Dulquer Salmaan on why Malayalam industry hasn’t given pan-India hit yet, comparison of King of Kotha with Pushpa

“There’s no influence as such. I do love him (Allu Arjun) as an actor and a performer. But this film was with us since 2019, the character sketch was put in place some three years ago. So we had this in our minds. I’ve heard this and I think in some ways it’s a compliment, we are not trying to imitate or copy but I hope it does what Pushpa did,” Dulquer added.

The film also stars Shabeer Kallarakkal, Prasanna, Aishwarya Lekshmi and Gokul Suresh among others. King of Kotha will be one of the biggest Malayalam films of recent times and Dulquer says the film’s scale was designed to be grand to cater to the demands of a post-COVID spectacle-hungry audience.

At the press conference, when asked why is there no pan-India hit film from the Malayalam film industry, Dulquer said the industry has always been apprehensive of going “bigger” but King of Kotha is his most expensive film yet.

“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.”

“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.”

The actor said it’s “beautiful” how people of the country are discovering so much more about each other, local stories and micro-culture. “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.

King of Kotha will be a grand Onam release, opening in cinemas on August 24 in Malayalam along with its dubbed versions in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Kannada. The film is backed by Wayfarer Films and Zee Studios.