Vidhu Vinod Chopra, a Bollywood filmmaker has talked about the release of his latest superhit film ’12th Fail’ in China.
There are plans to release Chopra’s movie ’12th Fail’ in China. “We are releasing in China in a big way this year,” Chopra said while exclusively talking to Variety. “I was invited to Macau by Marco Mueller for the Asia-Europe Young Cinema film festival. We had a standing ovation in China. And for me that was very gratifying,” he said by adding, “There were Hindi dialogues, and I of course couldn’t read the subtitles in Chinese. But the way people were clapping, the audience’s reaction was incredible.”
According to Chopra, he has no doubt that this film will do very well. “Not only in China, but in every market where there is struggle… where, like in the movie, there is a big government job that you can get through exams and then that changes your life. Where that one exam changes your life forever,” he said by adding, “Wherever that is… of course in China, in Korea… wherever that is, the film will do very well, because the people will relate to the struggle of the protagonist.” The China distributor has not been revealed yet.”
Chopra’s superhit movies such as ‘Sanju’ (2018), ‘3 Idiots’ (2009), and ‘PK’ (2014) being blockbusters in India, were hits in China as well. Moreover, Chopra talked about the success of the movie which grossed $8.5 million to date, more than three times its budget, and said, “Each film has its own God, and it’s always a mystery what that God does for that movie. So it’ll always remain a mystery to me as to why it did as well as it did.”
Chopra told the international magazine that for him, , “For me, perhaps because it was an honest film, made with honesty and it propagates honesty… and in today’s world, honesty is really in short, short supply. “So, perhaps because of that, it connected with so many people, but frankly I don’t have an answer for it. It’ll always remain a mystery,” he said.
Based on the 2019 book of the same name by Anurag Pathak, 12th Fail tells the true story of Manoj Kumar Sharma who conquered extreme familial poverty to pass one of the world’s toughest examination processes and become an Indian Police Service officer.
The modestly budgeted “12th Fail” was released theatrically in October 2023 and the movie later streamed on Netflix.
