Vikrant Rona producer Manjunath Gowda: There is a concerted effort to destroy our film and Kannada cinema

Kannada producer and distributor Manjunath Gowda has a lot on his plate right now. His latest, Vikrant Rona, has released in theatres, and Manjunath has the distribution responsibility of the film in the home state, Karnataka. While the film has been doing fairly decent business across markets, especially in the Telugu and Hindi belt, besides Kannada, of course, Manjunath says that there’s been a targeted effort to derail Vikrant Rona at the box office.

Speaking to a news channel, Manjunath said that social media was flooded with negative comments about Vikrant Rona a day prior to its theatrical release, at a time when even a premiere had not happened and the only people who’d seen the film being those associated with its making, distribution, or censor, for that matter. The filmmaker claimed that there were a lot of posts stating that Sudeep’s character makes an appearance only in the second half of the film, among others, meant not only to discourage people from coming to theatres, but also in having exhibitors wonder whether to screen the film or not. Manjunath says that he still managed to get enough screens for the film, after which he alleges there was a planned piracy of Vikrant Rona. The agency that he had got on board to track piracy of the film has removed as many as 26,000 illegal download links from the internet, he claimed.

The producer-distributor further stated that it has been brought to his notice that a section of influencers (popular Youtubers) was being paid to propagate negative reviews about the film. Manjunath added that all of this is very discouraging for a filmmaker to invest in a Kannada film, especially since major OTT platforms still shy away from picking content from the region.