Kamal Haasan’s ‘Thug Life’ is releasing in theatres on June 5th, 2025 and the anticipations are pretty damn high for this one as it brings back Haasan and Mani Ratnam together after a 35 year gap post ‘Nayakan’ (1987).
And since it going to be a big one it definitely deserves more time than usual on the big screens. Taking a step in this direction Haasan in a recent interview revealed that ‘Thug Life’ wouldn’t make it to Netflix India, it’s official streaming partner, before 8 weeks. He further stated that this wasn’t an experimental move and was rather strategic and necessary to make the industry healthy.
While the eight week gap is normal for Hindi films, regional movies move to OTT just four weeks after their theatrical release. But that won’t be the case for ‘Thug Life’ and it would join the list of films like ‘RRR’ and ‘Pushpa 2’ which also opted for the 8 week window.
But what’s different here is that the latter two are primarily Telugu films while ‘Thug Life’ is likely going to be the first Tamil film to opt for a longer theatrical run ever since OTTs came into picture.
What’s worth underscoring here is the fact that this raises the benchmarks even higher for ‘Thug Life’ and it will be interesting to see if it meets them or underwhelms at the box office.