Yet again, fans of ‘Superstar’ Rajinikanth have been left waiting for Kochadaiiyaan.
On Wednesday evening, just two days ahead of its much-publicised worldwide release, the film’s distributors, Eros International, said it would hit the theatres only on May 23. The delay was to “cater to the demand for multiple language and the 2D and 3D versions to release on the same day,” an official press release from the company stated.
The news about the release getting postponed started trickling in by the afternoon on social network Twitter, where people started pointing out that the online portals for booking tickets for the film had stopped reservations abruptly. Several people had already booked tickets online between midnight and Wednesday afternoon, and had been eagerly looking forward to catching the ‘first day first show’ of the film.
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By evening, Sathyam Cinemas was among the first to put out a tweet that the release had been postponed, and that the tickets would be refunded via the online merchant sites on which the transactions had been made. However, the news that some online transactions might take up to 10 days to refund left many fuming.
The sudden postponement of the film’s release has also led to a churning at the box-office where several films had planned their release for later this month, considering Kochadaiiyaan’s planed release on May 9 to maximum screens.
Now, it looks like a few films are trying to make good this sudden vacancy while a few other producers, who had planned to release their films later this month, have been left with no option but to re-schedule. An industry insider said this was an unhealthy trend as several small- and medium-producers would have to bear heavy losses.
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Rajinikanth had made his debut on Twitter only on Monday and expectations were high in the run-up to the film’s release, with more than 3 lakh persons ‘following’ the verified account. Some of them received posters of the film when they started following the actor on the social network.