The story of 1.3 billion people: Will PM Narendra Modi become a box office hit or just the Twitterati fest?

March 19: Adding up to the plethora of political films in 2019, most awaited ‘PM Narendra Modi’ has minimized the wait for its release by advancing its release date to April 5. Being directed by National Award-winner Omung Kumar B, starring Vivek Anand Oberoi in and as the Bharatiya Janata Party leader, ‘PM Narendra Modi’, the film has finally launched the trailer to add up to the excitement.

“We are bringing this film a week early on public demand. There is a lot of love and anticipation among the people and we don’t want them to wait longer”, claimed producer Sandip Ssingh.

 

The biopic is to be released in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil.

At the trailer launch event, Vivek Oberoi arrived dressed as Modi, prompting a journalist to shout out “Mitron”, PM’s frequent catchphrase.

 

Only minutes after the trailer dropped, the patriotic and catchy dialogues from the film garnered a lot of attention. In this era of twitteratti, many scenes were naturally turned into memes, just like any other trailers in the recent past. While for some, “Main sanyasi banna chhata hoon” became fodder for memes, for others it was Oberoi’s line “Hum Hindustani nahi ban paye”.

 

Just like the memes, the film has also started a whirl of controversies (not very surprisingly, since the name is “PM Narendra Modi”).

Although the party is not directly involved with the production, the film was launched in Mumbai by BJP leader and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. Party president Amit Shah (played by Manoj Joshi in the movie) was scheduled to launch of the film’s new poster, but cancelled due to the sad demise of Goa CM Manohar Parrikar.

 

Earlier this week, the Congress had told the Election Commission that the film’s release during the Lok Sabha polls should amount to a violation of the election code of conduct. But, responding to a question about the Opposition’s complaints about the timing of the release, Sandip Ssingh said, “You journalists can decide whether it is propaganda. We are focusing on bringing a honest story to the audiences”.

The film, which was scheduled to release on April 12 earlier, got preponed a week before, with some people calling it a strategy before the general elections. Some opinions are also stating that the makers did not want to clash the release with ‘The Tashkent Files’, a suspense thriller surrounding the story of the death of former Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, which will be releasing on April 12.

A lot of questions were also raised at the producer on how the film, which went into production in late January, was ready for release in 38 days. “If Modi can work with speed, why not us?”, explained Anirudh Chawla in spunky reply.

Recently, Vivek Oberoi had also got involved in a controversy when an organisation did a sting operation on Bollywood celebrities who agreed to take money and post political content as their personal view on various social media platforms. Asked about the incident, he said, "All I want to say is that people who know the truth, they know it. People who do not know, does not matter to me."