Mumbai: The theatrical run is over. The argument about the running time is not.
Mirzapur: The Movie arrived on Prime Video on Friday, eight weeks after it opened in cinemas on September 4. The platform announced a premiere for India and more than 240 countries and territories, and the film comes in an extended cut, with scenes that were not part of the theatre version.
It brings back Pankaj Tripathi as Kaleen Bhaiya, Ali Fazal as Guddu Pandit and Divyenndu as Munna Bhaiya. Ravi Kishan plays Babban Yadav, a drug lord from Jaisalmer, and Jitendra Kumar appears as Bablu.
It is an interquel, set between the events of the first season, which premiered in 2018. It is not a sequel to the third season, which means a viewer who has never seen the show can start at the beginning and land here without a gap.
The box office numbers, as reported by trade trackers, are the reason the film got this treatment. It collected Rs 233.73 crore net and Rs 275.83 crore gross in India, and Rs 61 crore overseas, for a worldwide gross of Rs 336.83 crore. On its reported budget, that works out to net returns of about Rs 143.73 crore and an estimated profit of 159.7 per cent on the investment.
The theatrical version ran three hours and 17 minutes, and length was the most common complaint in reviews. The extended cut adds to that rather than trimming it, a choice a streaming audience can absorb more easily than a cinema audience can. A viewer at home can pause.
Gurmmeet Singh directed the film. Puneet Krishna wrote it. Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar produced it under the Excel Entertainment banner, and Amazon MGM Studios presented it.
All three seasons of the series are on the same platform, which makes the interquel easy to place for anyone arriving late.
For the rest of the country, the film is now a Friday-night decision rather than a Rs 300 ticket. For Excel and Amazon, the second window is where a franchise title earns another round of attention before the next instalment is announced.