People from the Telugu film industry and trade circles started wondering if Donald Trump’s new immigration policies which were announced on 21st January 2015, will have any negative impact or not on the Telugu film business in the USA. There has been some kind of panic created among the Telugu diaspora in the USA about their future in the country following the new policy announcement by Trump.
Adding to the panic created by the new immigration policies, there are multiple raids by the authorities are happening since the last three to four weeks on restaurants, gas stations, etc., to identify the students who are working more than the allowed ‘weekly part-time job’ hours and taking severe action on such students. These raids created a huge panic among Telugu students in the USA and many of them are staying away from doing part-time jobs over the last few weeks.
Keeping all these latest developments under consideration, people from the Telugu film distribution circle were worried about crowd turnout to the theatres to watch new movies. They were worried about students coming to theatres to watch movies, especially to premiere shows by paying extra bucks. Post-COVID, the gross collections from the premieres day for Telugu films increased considerably due to the sudden surge in the Telugu student diaspora. The student turnout in good numbers to watch premier shows has become very critical for the distributor to recover the investment, especially for big and medium-range films.
Did the new policy announcement by the Trump government and legal action against the students who ‘overdoing’ their part-time jobs impact the film business? The answer is ‘Yes’ if we consider Naga Chaitanya and Sai Pallavi’s Thandel’s performance so far in the USA. Thandel is the first notable Telugu film that was released in theatres after Trump’s new policy announcement in January.
The songs from the film became chartbusters even before the release of the film, the production house, Geetha Arts, did a huge round of promotions before the release, and the lead pair, Naga Chaitanya & Sai Pallavi, earlier delivered a blockbuster film, Love Story, in their combination and more importantly, the distributor opted for standard ticket pricing for the film right from the premieres unlike other big and medium range movies in the recent past that used to opt for hiked prices for premier show tickets. Also, the film received decent to good reviews from almost all the media outlets and positive word of mouth from the audiences.
In an ideal scenario, the film should have done extremely well utilising all the aforementioned positives but the film’s performance so far in the USA is a bitaway to the expectations. It started on a decent note last Thursday with premieres but there was no growth observed throughout the weekend. Even the numbers from the premieres were just decent and should have been much better. The film so far collected about $700K+ from the USA and it is below par number considering the decent to good reviews and word of mouth that it has received.
It is too early to conclude the impact of Trump’s new immigration policies and students part-time job-related struggles on the Telugu film business in the USA. However, Thandel’s performance so far is certainly a worrying factor and if the similar trend continues with upcoming movies as well, then we may see considerable drop in revenues from the USA for Telugu movies in coming days.
Tags Donald Trump Thandel Thandel USA
