Vaathi box office: Dhanush starrer mints Rs 50 crore worldwide in the opening weekend

Helmed by Venky Atluri, Vaathi revolves around the right to education. Talking about the film, the director told indianexpress.com, “There was one incident when I was doing my junior college (Higher secondary is called junior college in Telugu states), and I don’t want to reveal the name of the college. Usually, we used to have classes from Monday to Saturday, and on Saturday and Sunday mornings, we used to have tests. There were senior lecturers and junior lecturers. The latter would take care of the tests. Once they had a drill of a kind where the junior lecturers were asked to go to the houses of the students and discuss the student’s academic performance. So, the lecturers were going to the homes of these students, and there was this one student whose house was just an under-construction building. There was nothing to the house except the four walls and sheets wrapped around the walls. That’s when lecturers came to know that the parents of the student were construction workers, who were spending all the money on their son’s education hoping that he would get a state rank, and they chose this college because it had top rankers last year. It was all because of propaganda and commercialisation of education. The propaganda is that a student can only score good grades if he studies in some particular college or school. That was the starting point for this film.”

#Vaathi #SIR grosses 51 crores in just 3️⃣ days🔥

Best ever opening for our Star @dhanushkraja 🥳#Vaathi #SIR tops Monday’s test results as expected 😎

‘D’ Rampage continues💥#VenkyAtluri @iamsamyuktha_ @gvprakash @dopyuvraj @NavinNooli @vamsi84 @SitharaEnts @7screenstudio pic.twitter.com/JxWtVZHujA

— Sithara Entertainments (@SitharaEnts) February 20, 2023

Vaathi garnered mixed reviews from critics and the audience upon its release. Indianexpress.com’s Anandu Suresh gave the movie 1.5 stars and said that it ‘fares poorly’. A part of the review read, “Despite having a stellar (though tried and tested multiple times) plot that could have helped Atluri create something as topical and entertaining as Pa Ranjith’s Kaala (2018) or Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Master (2021), Vaathi proves that a tight script is, at the end of the day, the only thing that actually works.”