Actor Pawan Kalyan, whose Sardaar Gabbar Singh (SGS) is to release simultaneously in Telugu and Hindi, on Friday, spoke his mind about how the suicide of research scholar at UoH, Rohith Vemula, was unfortunate.
Responding to questions fired at him in an exclusive interview to a national news channel, he said that people should not make politics out of it. He was even reported to have said that instances of unrest for several reasons, including the caste angle, were nothing new and that they had been happening for years. Earlier too, during the audio release function of SGS, he had talked about similar issues.
However, coming as it did less than 12 hours before the film’s release, it was expected to make ripples. The film set the box office ring in the United Arab Emirates where it was released around Thursday evening (India time) and film critic Umair Sandhu has given it a five-star rating. In the US alone, it will hit the screens in over 180 locations – the highest for a Telugu film. In all, it will show on over 300 screens outside India.
Closer home, in Hyderabad, there is an early morning benefit show (1 a.m.) in a theatre here and it opens to over 1,000 screens and shows for this weekend are said to be sold out.
In north India, the Hindi version will open on about 800 screens and its satellite rights were already lapped up for a record price. Considering the openings of Pawan Kalyan’s recent films - Atharintiki Daaredi in particular, movie pundits believe that SGS will surpass S.S. Rajamouli’s Bahubali and Mahesh Babu’s Srimanthudu on some counts.
