Another Week, Another Team Cries on Reviews

Another week, another film team upset with reviews. Praveen Kandregula and Anupama Parameswaran’s Paradha released last week and was met with overwhelmingly mixed response from critics, the exact opposite of what the team expected. They hoped for glowing reviews, but that did not happen.

Visibly frustrated, the director and the heroine came before the media at a so-called “Thank You Meet,” only to vent their anger at critics and reviewers. Anupama Parameswaran went as far as saying, “If you didn’t like the film, it is not our mistake, so the director doesn’t need to apologize.” She added that if a commercial film has a hundred mistakes, critics ignore them, but since Paradha is a woman-centric film, reviewers chose to magnify its flaws. That comparison shows how well she and the director analysed the failure of the film.

Meanwhile, the director pleaded, “Don’t kill the film.” He claimed that if it were truly bad, he himself would admit it. But the reality is clear. Reviews did not kill the film-its weak content did. The audience has already given its verdict, as seen in the box office numbers. Instead of using reviewers as a scapegoat, the team should try to understand why the film failed to connect.

As they themselves said before release, if the film had received an overwhelmingly positive response from audiences, the collections would have shown it. But they didn’t. In the U.S., Paradha grossed only $23K in its first weekend, proving that word-of-mouth was outright poor. So where is the logic in crying about reviewers when the real problem lies in the film itself?