Karnataka pulls Jana Nayagan, Spider-Man fills the slots

Screenings of Jana Nayagan have been halted across Karnataka, and in Bengaluru the vacated slots went to Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Theatre managements pulled Vijay’s cut-outs and banners off their premises the same afternoon, and videos of both the protests and the poster-stripping spread within hours.

The trigger is water, not cinema. The Cauvery Water Management Authority, acting on the regulation committee’s recommendation, directed Karnataka to release 3,500 cusecs a day to Tamil Nadu for the next fifteen days. Kannada organisations and farmer associations have been protesting the order since it landed, and a film fronted by the sitting Tamil Nadu chief minister made an unusually convenient target.

On Friday, members of pro-Kannada outfits gathered outside the Poornima and Urvashi theatres in Bengaluru, where the film was playing, objecting to a Tamil release running while the water row was live. Shows were stopped at both, and at a handful of other single screens in the city. At Sampige, the entire day’s schedule was cancelled and the Vijay posters on the walls were taken down or papered over.

This is the second time in a week the film has been forced off Karnataka screens. Earlier, a scheduled run at Gurushree Theatre in Mandya was cancelled after a Kannada organisation protested outside and tore the promotional banners down. Police cover has since been stepped up in pockets of the state with large Tamil-speaking populations.

The commercial cost is arriving in real time. Trade trackers put Day 9 at Rs 3.55 crore net in India, down 12.3 per cent from the previous day’s Rs 4.05 crore, across 4,165 shows. Nine days in, the film sits at Rs 157.10 crore net domestically, Rs 183.45 crore gross, and Rs 268.45 crore worldwide once the Rs 85 crore overseas gross is counted. Karnataka is not the market that decides a Vijay release, but losing it entirely in week two, when the drop-off curve is already steepening, is not a rounding error either.

H Vinoth’s film has now spent its entire life cycle fighting something external. Before release it was a leaked print and a censor process the director said was never really about the censor board; in theatres it has been carrying the weight of being a farewell and a manifesto at once. Pooja Hegde and Mamitha Baiju play the other principal roles.

Karnataka Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, meanwhile, has advised Vijay to stay away for now. “In the present situation the Tamil Nadu chief minister should not come to Karnataka,” he said. “With things this tense, it would not be right for him to visit. If protests break out here while he is in the state, that will not be good.”