Gatta Kusthi 2 picks Chennai's 85-year-old Casino for its first show

Gatta Kusthi 2 opens on July 3, and its first show in Chennai isn’t going to a multiplex. It’s going to Casino, the single screen on Mount Road that has been running since December 1941 and is, by most reckonings, the last cinema left from Madras’s pre-independence years.

Casino used to be the address for English cinema in the city. Mayabazar, the Telugu-Tamil fantasy classic, ran there for fifty straight weeks. MGR’s Enga Veettu Pillai hit a silver jubilee in the same hall a few years later. Through the seventies and eighties it was where Madras watched Ten Commandments, Jaws, the Bond films, the Rocky sequels, on a screen big enough that none of it needed subtitles to land. Then the multiplexes arrived in the nineties, Sathyam and Inox among them, and Casino slid into the background: second-string English re-runs, the odd Telugu weekend show, a marquee that stopped being anyone’s first choice.

The promotional art for the film’s first-day-first-show puts the theatre back in the frame, quite literally. Vishnu Vishal and Aishwarya Lekshmi are staged in wrestling stances on either side of Casino’s own facade, freshly relit for the occasion, the film’s poster pasted across the entrance the way single screens have always sold a big release. The producers are calling July 3, 8.30 am, the hall’s reopening: laser projection, Dolby Atmos, the works, on a building that has outlasted nearly every other cinema of its generation.

It’s a fitting home for a film built around a reversal. Gatta Kusthi 2 picks up Veera and Keerthi, the wrestling couple from Chella Ayyavu’s 2022 original, and flips their arrangement: Keerthi chases her wrestling career while Veera runs the house and the school runs. The trailer has already crossed four million views, the film cleared with a clean U certificate, and the third single House Husband, set to a Sean Roldan tune, has been out since yesterday. Vels Film International’s Ishari K Ganesh and Vishnu Vishal’s own banner are producing, and Vishnu Vishal already has Irandu Vaanam queued up right behind it, opposite Mamitha Baiju.

Whether the bet pays off is really two questions folded into one: does the film work, and does Mount Road still turn up for a single screen on a Friday morning. July 3 answers both.