Chaos at the box office: Scary Movie postponed; Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai, Peddi, He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe face screen-sharing issues

The first Friday of June will see several films releasing in cinemas like Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai, Bandar and Ram Charan-starrer Peddi. Two Hollywood films were also scheduled for release – He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe and Scary Movie. Bollywood Hungama has learned that the latter won’t be able to make it to cinemas this Friday, June 5. An exhibitor told Bollywood Hungama, “We don’t know what the reason is for the delay. It may be due to too many films this week. Last week’s Obsession is also going strong and it’ll take up some shows. Or it could be due to censorship issues. It now remains to be seen whether Scary Movie arrives next Friday, June 12.” Meanwhile, as expected, the screen-sharing issues have cropped up between Peddi in the Hindi-speaking markets and Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai. The former, which also stars Janhvi Kapoor, releases in cinemas on June 4. A trade source told us, “The non-national multiplexes have thrown open the bookings of Peddi. The issue ha...

‘We need to do something’: the company releasing Palestinian films no one else will

As many films struggle to find distribution, Watermelon Pictures has stepped in to help tell stories from Palestine and other marginalized communities

In March, The Encampments, a documentary on the pro-Palestinian protest movement on US college campuses, opened at the Angelika Film Center in New York. The nonfiction theatrical marketplace has never been breezy in the US, but this is a particularly difficult time for documentaries, let alone films about hot-button issues considered politically sensitive or, under the new administration, outright dangerous; one of the Encampments’ primary subjects, the Columbia University student-activist Mahmoud Khalil, remains in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) without charge for any crime. Large-scale distributors, including all of the major streaming services, are increasingly wary of anything deemed controversial, leaving such films as Union, on the Amazon Labor Union, or the Oscar-winning Palestinian-Israeli documentary No Other Land without distribution in the US.

Nevertheless, over an exclusive first-weekend run, The Encampments made $80,000 at the Angelika – the highest per-screen average for a documentary since the Oscar-winning Free Solo in 2018. That number may sound like peanuts compared with, say, the multimillion theatrical haul of a Marvel movie, but it’s a significant win for the specialty box office – and validation for a film whose mere existence, as a pro-Palestinian narrative, led to threats of violence at the Angelika, an incident of vandalism in the theater’s lobby and social media censorship of its ads.

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