Pushkara Mallikarjunaiah announces release of Vinay Rajkumar’s 10; no money for promotions says director Karm Chawla

Marketing a film and bringing it to audiences is one of the most difficult bits of showbiz and everyone worth his/her salt knows the importance of promoting a film and creating awareness around it. Most often, the bigger players with deeper pockets make sure they tick all the boxes when it comes to publicity, while the smaller guys either try and do their best with the available resources or just bring their films to theatres and hope that word-of-mouth promotion will work wonders for them.

Vinay Rajkumar is caught in one of these situations now. His film 10, in which he plays a boxer and is paired with Ashika Ranganath’s sister Anusha, has been ready and awaiting its moment of glory for the past couple of years. The film is the directorial debut of Karm Chawla, the cinematographer of Rakshit and Rishab Shetty’s Kirik Party, and has been produced by Pushkara Mallikarjunaiah. There has been absolutely no word on the film, and fans wondered if the filmmaker was looking at taking it to OTT directly. Until earlier today, when news broke that Pushkara is bringing it to theatres after all. Problem is, he is barely giving the team enough time to catch a breath and see if they can publicize its release after all. 10, as it turns out, will be in theatres on December 16. There are a bunch of other small-time Kannada films lined up on the same day, but none of them may stand any chance as December 16 is when James Cameron’s much-awaited Avatar 2 releases.

An earlier Instagram story by director Karm Chawla’s was of picture of Anusha with a caption that read, “We don’t have money to market our film. We really don’t. And it is dropping in theatres. Hence I believe cute faces like this which are not a part of the film might work.”

Fans are less than pleased about this turn of events, saying that Vinay deserves better than this. It may be noted that when Avatara Purusha part 1 came out, OTTplay had hinted that the sequel would be delayed as the production house was in financial doldrums. Team members had spoken to OTTplay asserting that this was not true. In fact, director Suni and lead actor Sharan had an Instagram live in which they’d claimed that Avatara Purusha 2 would be out by Dasara this year. Well, that has come and gone and there is no word on that film.

"@Pushkara_M sir is everything fine? Nodidre not all ansuthe e tara nim film yavdhu zero promotion ali bandirlilla not a good decission. Neev yen problem face madthideero let all gets vanished and come out as a 🏆 hope this movie gets success," wrote a user called Kumar, while another added, "Worst decision @Pushkara_M @PushkarFilms 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️Vinay deserves better than this."