Karuppu opens at 9 AM. Or does it?

Hours before what was supposed to be a 9 AM Karuppu first show, PVR INOX has cleared its listings for the film on BookMyShow. The only Karuppu shows visible on Wednesday night are at standalone single-screen theatres scattered across Tamil Nadu; the country’s dominant multiplex chain is missing from the page. The producers have not put out a statement.

RJ Balaji, who writes and directs Karuppu, did. At 9:40 PM, the director posted on X: “Dearest fans, I don’t have a concrete answer to the current situation. Producers are doing their best to solve the hurdles. This film has always had hurdles, and somehow God has made us sail through all that and here we are after 32 months.” In Tamil, he closed with the assurance that Karuppu will release on schedule on Thursday morning, asking fans to keep the faith.

This is the same film whose makers were thanking the new chief minister 24 hours ago for clearing a 9 AM special show. All-India pre-sales had crossed Rs 2.34 crore by Tuesday morning, with Rs 1.90 crore of that in Tamil Nadu alone. The film opens, on paper, on May 14 across Tamil and Telugu markets.

What the hurdles actually are has not been spelled out. The pattern these films usually break on, in Tamil cinema, is some last-minute disagreement in the producer-distributor-financier chain: an unpaid tranche, a contested theatrical-rights share, a banner pulling out on release eve until a number gets settled. Karuppu’s credit stack runs long, with co-presenters and distributors layered beneath the primary producers; the surface area for that kind of fight is wide.

And the cost of a stall now is brutal. The CM’s 9 AM clearance was a political favour the industry has not seen in years, in practice close to a thousand extra shows across Tamil Nadu over the two release days, every one of them dependent on a film that actually opens on Thursday. The PVR INOX pullout knocks out the entire multiplex chain on top of that, every slot of every day, not just the 9 AM curiosity. Whatever the dispute is worth, it is sitting in the way of money many times its size, a CM courtesy that will not be reissued, and a window the producers have been chasing for 32 months.

What happens at 9 AM on Thursday will be visible to anyone with a BookMyShow refresh. Until then, the only firm fact is the absence: the country’s largest theatre chain has, for the moment, stopped selling tickets to a film opening tomorrow.