Thalapathy Vijay is King of Lockdown

Who won the lockdown battle in Tamil Nadu? No, it is not EPS- Stalin-Modi or Radhakrishnan. It is Thalapathy Vijay. He beat Rajinikanth and pushed him to third place. Raghava Lawrence overtook his `Guru’ and came second. Did they find a vaccine or put in place a mechanism to bring down Covid 19 cases? No. Then what the hell did Thaalapathy do to win during lockdown? Thalapathy Vijay’s film screened on TV during lockdown clocked more views than Rajinikanth and Raghava Lawrence came second. Who says so? BARC. What? We never said so and don’t use our letterhead or we will take action says BARC. Now there is an all round embarrassment in Thalapthy’s social media circles. Some said it was from unofficial twitter accounts and others said that it was a result of a serious analysis of BARC TRP ratings for channels and came to this conclusion. They only added the BARC logo for `effect’. The fans made a serious study of TRP during the times when Thalapathy films were telecast. Then they made a note of the figures of Raghava Lawrence and Rajinikanth films telecast in the same period. They further expanded the scope to other languages and saw that Prabhas and Akshay Kumar were trailing behind. Now what is the finding? Vijay clocked 117.9 million impressions and Rajinikanth had only 65.8 million. Now Rajinikanth fans say that more number of Vijay films was screened and so the figures are high. Now at the start of the 2020, BARC released a list of top 5 premieres. All Time Top 5 Tamil Premiere TV Impressions saw Ajith at the top. 1. #Viswasam - 18143000 2. #Pichaikkaran - 17696000 3. #Sarkar - 16906000 4. #SeemaRaja - 16766000 5. #Bigil – 16473000 So Thala Ajith fans can now boast of this unbeaten record. What puzzles me is the rise of Raghava Lawrence to second position? Were his films with horror- comedy stuff the right relief material for the TV viewers locked in their rooms? A relief from visuals of men in blue coats carrying dead bodies? Here again, Thalapathy fans can say that Sarkar + Bigil is more than Viswasam of Ajith. As I am doing some test shoots on YouTube for my channel (which was lying defunct), I took a look at those that I used to watch every week. Some are around, others not seen and some in a new avatar. Speaking about Avatar, a report said that Sushanth Singh Rajput’s upcoming film Dil Bechara trailor broke the world record in YouTube of having maximum views on first day. It was held by Avatar and Avatar Infinity From my viewing some YT channels on Tamil cinema news, I gather that Thalapathy fans are angry with these news floating around – Britto ( Vijay’s relative) is only a dummy producer of upcoming `Master’ and media mistakenly is interviewing him. The real producer is Lalith Kumar. Other one is that Jagatheesh, manager of Vijay and Line producer of Master has been sacked as Britto complained about many irregularities that took place at the Master audio launch. Third news that upcoming producer (Sun TV?) has backed out after Thalapathy refused to cut his fees. The timing of raking up the old Thalapathy- Napolean rift on sets of Pokkiri is too said to be handiwork of the anti- Jagadeesh camp to irritate Vijay.