Another Kabali post!  Combination of box office, industry news, and human interest!  Because this movie is so big, it is effecting all 3 of those areas!

First, box office!  This is super exciting, on Thursday Kabali was No. 3 in the American box office.  Right behind The Secret Life of Pets and Ghostbusters and ahead of Finding Dory.  While Disney is taking the Indian box office (The Jungle Book beating Fitoor in opening weekend), Rajnikanth is stealing their own country out from under them.

There are already Hindi remake rumors, although not so much because it is a hit, as because the Hindi dubbed version is the one area where it is flopping.  It just doesn’t translate well, so the filmmakers are thinking the best option is to remake the whole thing, with Hindi dialogues and more national/north Indian plot.  And, of course, Amitabh is being talked about to star.  Because who else is as big as Rajnikanth?

And then there are the fun human interest stories!  First, a reporter from NDTV took the special Kabali airplane from Bangalore to Chennai for first day-first show.  There were sunglasses on every seat, they received instructions in the proper flip way to put them on instead of a safety briefing, there was a lucky drawing for a Rajnikanth sofa (I guess with a picture of him on it?) for one lucky passenger, and the winner accepted her prize bare foot, because “she was going to see her God, she didn’t need shoes.”

And here’s a nice story being labeled the “Rajnikanth effect”.  A fan, Vasanth Paul, returning from the first show, took a side road to avoid a traffic jam and heard a woman calling for help.  He stopped his car to investigate and found her being attacked by 3 rapists.  He fought them off, calling for help from a passing auto-rickshaw driver, and the woman managed to escape.  Don’t know if the auto-rickshaw driver was another Rajnikanth fan, or just a decent person.