Nani’s The Paradise hits Netflix after a box office that wasn’t enough

Some movies get a second life on streaming. Some get a second trial. Nani’s The Paradise arrives on Netflix today with a box office total that sounds big, a budget that made it look small, and a star who has already publicly admitted what went wrong.

The Telugu-language period action drama starts streaming on Netflix on Oct. 22 in Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam, according to The Week, citing Netflix’s South India account. It opened in theaters on Sept. 24.

I read through the coverage of its theatrical run. The numbers tell a story the film’s marketing never did.

What it is

The Paradise is directed by Srikanth Odela, his second film with Nani after Dasara, The Week reported. It’s set in the slums of 1980s Secunderabad, and Nani plays Jadal, a tribal leader. The cast includes Kayadu Lohar, Raghav Juyal, Mohan Babu and Sonali Kulkarni. Anirudh Ravichander composed the music.

Critics described the story as a familiar revenge drama, according to The Week. What they praised was everything around it: Nani’s performance and physical transformation, the atmosphere, the depiction of the slums and, most of all, Anirudh’s background score, which The Week called a major highlight.

A hit on paper

The film opened to about ₹76.90 crore worldwide in its first weekend, The Week reported. Its total gross reportedly reached around ₹173.41 crore, with India net collections of ₹120.79 crore by the third week.

For readers outside India, a crore is 10 million rupees, so ₹173 crore is roughly ₹1.73 billion. On paper, that’s a large gross. The Telugu version accounted for about ₹108 crore of the India net, according to The Week, which shows how heavily the film leaned on its home audience.

A miss on the books

The problem is what it cost. The budget was an estimated ₹150 crore to ₹200 crore, The Week reported. Shooting reportedly ran more than 180 days against a planned 100, pushing costs up.

Collections also dropped sharply after the opening days as audience reactions soured, according to The Week. Distributors in Andhra Pradesh reportedly took considerable losses, and the film is widely seen as a commercial underperformer.

That’s the trap of modern star-driven cinema in India. A film can gross more than most movies ever will and still lose money for the people who paid to show it, because the budget and the expectations were built for a much bigger number. Gross isn’t profit, and in Indian film, the distributors often feel the gap first.

The star who said sorry, sort of

Nani reportedly returned part of his fee to help producer Sudhakar Cherukuri with the losses, according to The Week. He also responded to the criticism on social media, saying he had learned from the flaws reviewers pointed out and acknowledging that post-production was rushed.

That’s unusually candid for a star whose film was still in theaters. It also shifts some of the blame from the script to the schedule, which is a more forgiving place to put it.

My read: a star giving money back is a real gesture, and it says something about the economics of the industry that it’s needed. When a lead actor’s fee is large enough to matter to a film’s losses, the budget was always going to be hard to recover.

Why Netflix matters here

Streaming offers two things to a film like this. One is a new audience, especially for the Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam versions, whose theatrical numbers were small; the Hindi version earned about ₹10.50 crore net in India, according to The Week. The other is a second round of judgment from people who never paid for a ticket.

That second round can be harsh. One preview expected some scenes to draw criticism and trolling on social media once the film is a click away.

From the couch

For a viewer at home, none of the budget drama matters. What’s on offer is a period action film with a committed lead performance and a loud, well-reviewed score, wrapped around a story critics found familiar. Watch it for Nani and for Anirudh, and lower your expectations for the second half, which reviewers singled out as slow.

What we don’t know

Netflix doesn’t publish what it paid for streaming rights, and the coverage doesn’t say how much of the losses the deal recovers. Box office figures also vary between trackers, so treat the exact totals as estimates.

The Paradise sold a lot of tickets and still came up short. Now it gets a second shot, with nobody paying at the door.

Sources

• The Week: The Paradise OTT release on Netflix
• India TV: The Paradise OTT release details
• Filmibeat: The Paradise OTT release date and platform
• Pinkvilla: When and where to watch The Paradise online

Photos

• “Rows of Red Seats in a Theater” by maxxyustas, Envato Elements (featured image)