After months of love, Kantara now trends for being the ‘overrated’ film of 2022

The level of success that Rishab Shetty’s ‘mannina kathe’ Kantara achieved since its theatrical release on September 30, came as a surprise not only to industry watchers, but to the makers themselves. This was a small film that they were looking at releasing in Kannada only, and hopefully have it in theatres for a couple of weeks. But then, Kantara took on a life of its own, owing predominantly to the last 30-odd minutes, with audiences dubbing it a divine blockbuster.

As a result, the film, which was to be dubbed into other languages for OTT only, had to be ready in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam in only two weeks, and over the course of the month and a half, helped Kantara get to a whopping Rs 400 crore worldwide box office collection. On the surface of it, it seemed that everyone who saw the film was loving it and Rishab’s conviction in his storytelling.

But then, the film dropped on OTT, first on Amazon Prime in the four south Indian language versions and subsequently on Netflix with the Hindi version, and it appeared that the sheen was finally wearing off. Kantara dropped on Netflix on November 24, and there’ve been a steady stream of social media posts that the film is not as spectacular as it is being made out to be. Today, the film began trending on Twitter, after two industry tracking handles posted a query about the most overrated film of 2022. The overwhelming response to both was Kantara.

“#Kantara is an overrated movie inline with KGF2, Pushpa and RRR. There is nothing great about it in any terms whether it is storyline, cinematography or the overall acting and script. It is still a hit like many other plotless and common scenario south movies,” wrote one user. Another chipped in, “Kantara = overrated. The cinematography, editing, music, casting & acting, especially the scene where the almost dead protagonist starts doing bhootakola at the end of the film was epic. But when it comes to the story, the plot, the film sucks.”

“Kantara is highly overrated. fake promotion and campaign, not at all worth for 400 crores,” was a third. Several others chose to answer with just one word, “Kantara”, offering no explanation.