Prabhas’ Adipurush advance booking opens in Karnataka

Prabhas’ Adipurush is releasing in theatres on Friday, June 16, and given the magnitude of it, advance bookings were expected as early as June 11. And it has, with ticket aggregators opening bookings at a few multiplex screens. In Bengaluru, for instance, Inox Cinemas has opened bookings for the film, with others set to join in through the day. So far, there is no indication of early morning shows in the region and the bookings that have opened are for the Telugu 3D version.

In Karnataka, KRG Studios is distributing the Prabhas-Kriti Sanon-Saif Ali Khan-led film. The makers have dubbed versions in Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam also ready, apart from Hindi, of course, but it is expected that the lion’s share of the screens will be allocated to Telugu, followed by Hindi and then the other languages. Karthik Gowda of KRG Studios had confirmed that advance bookings will open on June 11, but questions that netizens asked him in response about the possibility of early morning shows, or the language-wise split remained unanswered. Adipurush, Karthik said, is the 90th release for the distribution and marketing firm, which has now also turned to film production.

Netizens have urged Karthik to allocate ample number of screens for the Kannada version, but according to an earlier report, Adipurush is looking at 6000+ screens across the country, of which 4000 are meant for the Hindi version and only the rest being split among the other languages. With Prabhas at the helm, this can only mean that the Telugu version will be the front-runner for the rest of the screens. If the responses to Karthik’s social media posts about distributing Adipurush are anything to go by, there is a healthy demand for the Kannada version of the film, but the trend for such big non-Kannada movie releases has been that the original language gets the lion’s share.

Netizens had created furore over the lack of Kannada shows for RRR in the past, but the distributors had countered this claiming that exhibitors were not keen on picking it up owing to low footfalls.