Rana Daggubati’s dream project Haathi Mere Saathi in three languages has run into heavy weather , and not just because of the Covid situation. It seems the decision to release the Tamil and Telugu versions of the film(entitled Kaadan in Tamil, Aranya in Telugu) before the Hindi version, has spelled doom for the project.
The Tamil and Telugu versions of Haathi Mere Saathi, released on March 26, have flopped miserably. And the main factor going against the project was its inordinate length. With a running time 150 minutes, no one had the patience to sit through the long film during these times of a pandemic .
Apparently there were huge arguments over the film’s length between the director and producer.
A very angry members of the cast spills the beans, “Our director Prabhu Solomon had a good idea in mind. We all loved doing the film as it shows how Man mis-uses Nature. But the final film turned out to be more than three hours long.We convinced him to cut it by half an hour. But no more.”
We now hear the Hindi version will be released with a further cut of 30 minutes bringing it down to a reasonable 2 hours of playing time.One thing is for sure. The days of self-indulgent filmmakers are over.
