Director Sudipto Sen’s drama film The Kerala Story has been the center of controversy ever since the trailer was launched. The makers have claimed that the movie is based on true events and follows the story of a group of women from Kerala who are converted to Islam and join the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
There was hardly any buzz around the film a couple of weeks ago but due to the controversy, everyone is now aware of it which is proving to be advantageous as far as the box office of the film is concerned. “The Kerala Story” has been able to fetch a decent advance booking collection and despite being not a mainstream Bollywood movie, it has better pre-sales than films like “Kuttey” and “Gumraah” which had a bigger star cast and scale.
As of 9 PM on May 3, the pre-sales collection of “The Kerala Story” is approx. 75 lacs with around 35K tickets sold for the first day. The final pre-sales is likely to be around 1 crore at the end of the day. As far as the opening is concerned, the movie might surprise with a 3-4 crores net start which will be a decent result considering it is not a big-budget film and has less cinematic value.
Produced by Vipul Amrutlal Shah, “The Kerala Story” is along the lines of director Vivek Agnihotri’s “The Kashmir Files” which turned out to be a huge blockbuster last year. TKF took the opening of around 3.50 crores, but the word of mouth and controversy helped it big times as it ended up scoring over 250 crores net and over 340 crores gross at the worldwide box office
