Actor Antony Varghese's large-scale film Kattalan started streaming on ManoramaMAX recently, after its theatrical release. Interestingly, the film's digital premiere proved a landmark moment for ManoramaMAX, marking the first time the streamer also released a film with its own dubbed versions. The Malayalam film is also available with Tamil and Kannada dubs on the streaming platform, thus making it available to a wider audience.
Directed by Paul George, Kattalan hit theatres on May 28, Thursday. The film tells the story of a rivalry between two gangs involved in ivory trade. The film earned much appreciation for its making, although Ravi Basrur's background score earned mixed opinion from audiences. However, the audience criticised it for lack of substance in the story.
Kattalan is made on a reported budget of around 50 crore. The film unfortunately did not perform as well as expected at the box office.
According to the box office tracker Sacnilk, it only earned around 10 crore from theatres. Besides Antony Varghese, the film also stars Sunil, Kabir Duhan Singh, Dushara Vijayan, Parth Tiwarii, Jagadish, Siddique, Hanan Shaah, Hipster, Anson Paul, Raj Tirandasu, and Shon joy.
Despite the theatrical response, the makers of the film and its streamer are expecting better reception from the audience catching it for the first time on OTT. The multilingual release of the film is part of ManoramaMAX's strategy to make select content in Malayalam accessible to a wider section of audiences.
Kattalan marked the directorial debut of Paul George, who directed it from his screenplay with Joby Varghese and Jero Jacob. The film brought Antony Varghese together with Marco producer Shareef Muhammed of Cubes Entertainments. On the technical front, it also has cinematographers Renadive, Chandru Selvaraj, and Sudeep Elamon; editor Shameer Muhammed, and stunt choreographers Action Sandhosh and Kecha Khamphakdee.
