2018 box office collection: Tovino Thomas film beats Pulimurugan to become highest grossing Malayalam movie at ₹150 cr

Malayalam survival drama 2018, which is based on the Kerala floods, has emerged as the highest-grossing Malayalam film ever surpassing Mohanlal’s Pulimurugan which had held the record since 2016. On Saturday, the Jude Anthany Joseph film breached the ₹150 crore club globally. Also read: Malayalam filmmaker Jude Anthany Joseph claims ‘ungrateful’ Antony Varghese took ₹10 lakh, opted out of project

The film, which was also dubbed and released in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi on Friday, stars Tovino Thomas, Kunchako Boban, Asif Ali, Vineeth Srinivasan, Aparna Balamurali and Kalaiarasan among others.

2018 box office

As per a report on Boxoffice India, 2018 has grossed ₹153 crore globally as on Sunday. In Kerala, the film has grossed ₹80.24 crore and is still counting. The report further added that the Hindi version of the film did not do as well as expected.

Made on a budget of around ₹20 crore, 2018 opened to very ordinary response on the day of its release. It picked up stream from second day following very strong word-of-mouth. In its opening weekend worldwide, it grossed over ₹30 crore.

Controversy around 2018

A week after its release, the film was heavily panned by Kerala’s Knowledge Economy Mission director and writer P S Sreekala. In a Facebook post, she said that the film is based on factual distortion and lies. She further added that the director should have researched properly. In the post, she wrote that the film portrays the chief minister as helpless when he was at the forefront of the rescue operations.

PS Sreekala’s post

As reported by Onmanorama, Sreekala wrote, “Presentation of half-truths is as dangerous and scandalous as propaganda. Cinema is an area that has benefited greatly from the development of technology. It is in this context that some films needn’t be celebrated. On the contrary, it would be a pity not to use such possibilities according to the content. But it is a clever strategy to harness the best of technology to turn cinema into a strategy that is even more effective if the director knows his craft. Jude Anthany has applied that strategy well in the film. The director was heard saying that this film was born out of his guilt. I don’t know if he really said that. If he has said that then the guilt should come from the unscientific observation that the opening of the dam was the cause of the 2018 floods. And the film more or less tries to establish that theory to an extent.”