Kantara: Rishab Shetty starrer becomes highest grossing Kannada film in north India

For a film that was supposedly made with a budget a tad under Rs 20 crore, Rishab Shetty’s Kantara has brought in several multiples of that already, even though it was released globally only in Kannada with English subtitles. In fact, in almost all the regions that the film has been released, including the US, it has gone on to become the highest grossing Kannada film. The distinction clearly being that unlike other big-ticket pan-India releases, Kantara is yet to be opened in other language versions.

Over the last weekend, Karthik Gowda, the founder of KRG Studios and executive producer at Hombale Films, the makers of Kantara, took to Twitter to confirm that the movie had become the highest grossing Kannada film in north India as of October 8. Industry trackers have since said that the film raked in between Rs 65-70 lakh on October 9 in Mumbai, where it has well over 100 shows currently.

It is being reported that the film is inching close to half a million in collections in the US, with this figure likely to go up significantly once the Hindi, Tamil and Telugu dubbed versions release by the end of the week. In Karnataka, the film is believed to have crossed the lifetime collections of several other major releases, with conservative estimates pegging its gross collection to around Rs 60 crore in the 10 days since its release. Industry insiders say that Kantara is likely to get into the Rs 100 crore world-wide collection report even before the release of the Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam versions.

Kantara, which also stars Kishore, Sapthami Gowda and Achyuth Kumar in pivotal roles, was believed to be the dark horse of the Hombale Films lineup. Despite its limited pre-release promotions, the film has been doing better than a lot of pan-India movies that had multi-lingual releases and massive publicity spends.