Madhavan's GDN skips a clash with Vijay and lands on one with Lokesh

GDN was supposed to be in theatres today. R. Madhavan’s biopic of the Coimbatore inventor GD Naidu had July 17 locked, the trailer was already out, and then the date quietly slid three weeks to August 7. The makers put out a fresh poster and a line of copy, “Story of a Man Driven by Passion, Fueled by Legacy,” and left the reason unsaid. The reason is not hard to work out.

July 23 is Jana Nayagan, Vijay’s farewell film and the biggest release of the Tamil year by a distance. Nothing that opened in the days around it was going to get clean screens, and a mid-budget biopic least of all. Moving out of that blast radius is sensible. The catch is where GDN landed. August 7 is also the day Lokesh Kanagaraj’s DC opens, the gangster drama that shifted to that exact date last week for the exact same reason, to stay clear of Vijay. Two films ran from the same juggernaut and ended up in the same lifeboat. GDN now shares its opening weekend with the most-tracked directorial debut-as-actor in Tamil cinema right now.

The films could not be more different, which may be the saving grace. DC is dark, violent, A-rated pulp. GDN is a period biopic about a self-taught engineer, the man remembered as India’s Edison, who took imported machines apart in Coimbatore and rebuilt them into things ordinary Indians could afford. One is for the front-bench crowd, the other for families and the older audience that turns out for a real-life story. They may not be fishing in the same pond.

For Madhavan this is familiar territory in more ways than one. He built the back half of his career on playing real Indian men of invention, most visibly Nambi Narayanan in Rocketry, and GDN reunites him with the same producing partners from that film, Varghese Moolan Pictures alongside his own Tricolour Films run with his wife Sarita. Govind Vasantha, who scored Meiyazhagan and 96, composes, and Aravind Kamalanathan shoots it while also serving as creative producer. Jayaram, Priyamani and Yogi Babu fill out the cast.

Directed by Krishnakumar Ramakumar, GDN opens in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi on August 7. It has three weeks to build the kind of family word-of-mouth that a biopic lives or dies on before it meets Lokesh at the box office.