Dulquer Salmaan talks about why Malayalam cinema hasn’t given a Pan-India hit

Mollywood superstar Duqluer Salmaan will next be seen in his highly anticipated film, King of Kotha. Dulquer will be playing the role of gangster. The film is going to be the most expensive movie from the Malayalam film industry. At the press conference of the King of Kotha on Thursday, Dulquer Salmaan was asked why there has been no Pan-India hit from the Malayalam film industry.

The actor said, “Especially post COVID and the advent of OTT, now if you want to draw people to theatres, you’ve to offer a theatrical experience. There has to be some kind of spectacle, people need that value for money, they need that entertainment on a larger scale. Malayalam industry has always been very budget focused, we’re always a bit wary of going bigger.”

He added, “But I think in the lockdown when people watched our cinema, it made us familiar faces across. Now we have a lot more courage to push that. In my journey, working in all these industries, I feel I can dub my films and bring them to audiences everywhere. So with this, we pushed as much as we could, in terms of budget and scale we went all out. It’s my most expensive film to date. It’s the biggest film we have produced as a company.”

Dulquer said that it is nice to see the country discovering more language films over the past three years. “Like a Kantara had the beauty of that (region) which wasn’t familiar with people up North. I love that we are telling rooted stories and then getting. When we say we don’t have those big Pan-Indian films, I think certain stories lend themselves to that, some are maybe smaller in scale. The audience is spoilt for choice because we have films from everywhere. So if you have to penetrate in that manner, you’ve to come up with something big and make a lot of noise. When we started the film, our goal was to make it as big as possible and it’s something with which hopefully we can push those boundaries,” he added.

Coming to King of Kotha, the film is produced by Wayfarer Films and Zee Studios. It will release on August 24 in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Kannada.