With the collections of much-hyped action adventure ‘Skanda’ dropping drastically after sensational day one openings, young hero Ram Pothineni’s dream to go a few notches up as an action hero is shattered a bit. “The film has garnered 14-odd crores net collections till now and is going down the hill with remote chances of picking up,” says a distributor, who claims that the film has to cover another Rs 26 crores to break even since the film was reportedly traded for over Rs 40 crores worldwide.
“Despite being a long holiday weekend, the action film couldn’t register good collections after a sensational day-one collection of Rs 9 crores since collections dropped on subsequent days. Even the word-of--mouth publicity didn’t help the film due to contrived storyline,” he adds.
Actually, Boyapati Sreenu is known for delivering action adventures and tasted success with Balakrishna (Legend and Akhanda) and Allu Arjun (Sarrainodu) but couldn’t repeat the magic with another big star Ram Charan as their film ‘Vinaya Vidheya Rama’ failed to turn into a blockbuster after two days collections and also received a lot of flak on social media. “A good section of Ram Charan fans are quite educated so they couldn’t digest a vulture flying away with heads of thugs and also villain ( Vivek Oberoi) getting himself bitten by a venomous snake. Such mindless feats dented its collections,” he adds.
Now, Ram Pothineni, who scored hits with lover boy roles like ‘Ready and ‘Nenu Sailaja’ and also scored well with breezy action films like ‘Kandireega’ and ‘Pandaga Chesko’, joined hands with Boyapati Sreenu to move up the ladder further. "He wanted to move to action hero league after the massive success of ‘iSmart Shankar’ but he would be a bit disappointed with 'Skanda'. Now, he has to wait for ‘Double iSmart to bounce back into the reckoning,” he concludes.
