‘Orange’ Is A Missed Opportunity In Theatres During It’s First Release?

As a follow-up movie for Ramcharan right after the gigantic success of ‘Magadheera’ and as the third film of the director, Bhaskar, after ‘Bommarillu’ and ‘Parugu’, Orange was released in theatres in 2010 amidst huge expectations but ended up becoming a huge disaster commercially. The result of the film impacted the thought process of Ramcharan in selecting scripts for his films. After Orange, he never did a film with an out-and-out love story. After promising a lot of potential with his first two films, the director, Bhaskar’s career went downhill. And, the producer, Nagababu, faced a deep financial crisis for a few years after the release of ‘Orange’. 

The film has one of the best audios that came out of the Telugu film industry. All six songs in the film were chartbusters and still are ruling the playlists of music lovers, especially the youth. Ramcharan’s styling in the film is still being appreciated and followed by the youth. The film has its flaws but a majority of the people feel that it doesn’t deserve a ‘Disaster’ result at the box office. A section of people believe that the film’s concept of ‘Short Term Love’ is way ahead of its time and it sure would have found many takers had it been released in theatres post-2020. 

Proving the ‘Way ahead of its time’ theory right, Orange did extremely well in theatres when it was re-released in theatres last year. Theatres in both Telugu states, especially in Hyderabad city, turned into concerts with youth and fans thronged in good numbers into theatres when it was re-released last film. The film collected a gross of around ₹5 Crores in its re-release with multiple houseful shows not just on day one but for almost a week. 

The film was re-released for the second time in theatres this Friday on the occasion of Valentine’s Day and not so surprisingly, the people thronged to theatres yet again and turned theatres into concerts. As of now, around sixty thousand tickets have sold out on the ticketing portal, Book My Show, for the film on its second re-release, and is looking good to add a few more thousand tickets in its name. 

The success of the film during re-releases in theatres made us wonder what would have happened if the film went on to become a success in theatres back in 2010. We would have seen many films with love stories from Ramcharan and many quality films from the director, Bhaskar, had the film become a blockbuster in 2010. Unfortunately, it ended up becoming a disaster back then and made Ramcharan stay away from doing ‘Love Story’ films and impacted the very promising career of the director, Bhaskar.