Re-Releases In TFI: Makers Missing A Simple Logic?

In the post-COVID era, re-releases have become a trend in Indian cinema, especially in Tollywood. In the last few years, many old films have been re-released in theatres. While some of them break records at the box office, some fail to generate any buzz or money. One such re-release is Nandamuri Balakrishna’s Lakshmi Narasimha.

Ahead of Balakrishna’s birthday this week, one of his successful films, Lakshmi Narasimha, was re-released on June 7 in the premium 4K format. However, the lack of buzz resulted in poor openings for the film. According to the reports, many scheduled shows in AP and Telangana were cancelled due to poor advance bookings.

Reportedly, apart from a couple of shows in Kukatpally, no shows in Hyderabad had even 10% occupancy the other day. Going by this trend, it looks like not every re-release will be a cash machine at the box office. Ahead of every star hero’s birthday, we see re-releases of that particular actor’s successful old movies, but not all of them have repeat watch value. People come to theatres only to watch films that have repeat value.

Maybe, a lack of repeat watch value has affected the business of a successful film like Lakshmi Narasimha during its re-release. Hopefully, makers, fans and distributors keep this simple logic in mind before re-releasing any successful movie from the past.