Karthik Subbaraj's Keerthy Suresh starrer, which opened to strong numbers and a trailer-twisting climax, has seen its daily haul fall sharply six days after release.
Dorothy's box office run has cooled off fast. The Karthik Subbaraj film, which opened on September 25 with daily numbers comfortably above 1.5 crore, collected only 83 lakh on its sixth day in theatres, according to trade tracker Sacnilk. The film's total stands at roughly 6.08 crore so far.
That's a steep fall from where it started. Dorothy walked into theatres carrying heavy expectations. Ilaiyaraaja composed the music, the trailer had done the rounds, and the film had screened at the Toronto International Film Festival to reportedly warm applause. Pre-release notes from Anurag Kashyap and Dhanush added to the noise before a single paying audience had seen it.
Keerthy Suresh headlines the cast but doesn't carry the lead role here. That job belongs to Rishi and Sananth, playing childhood friends whose bond gets tested when Keerthy Suresh's character enters their lives. Rishi came into this one riding the success of his last outing, a film that had turned into an unexpected hit, and Dorothy looked like the next step up.
Except Subbaraj had other plans. Audiences who walked in expecting a straightforward love triangle built around the trailer got something else entirely. The film pivots into territory around trans identity, with Sananth's character transitioning over the course of the story. The climax, which pairs Rishi's character romantically, and in one widely discussed kiss, with Sananth's now-female character, landed as a genuine surprise for a crowd that hadn't been prepared for it by the marketing.
The reaction split cleanly. A large section of viewers praised the swerve, calling it among the more striking pieces of Tamil cinema this year. A smaller, louder group, the self-appointed guardians of culture as the Tamil press has dubbed them, pushed back hard against the content. That friction, playing out across social media and review threads, has been as much a talking point as the film's craft.
What it hasn't done is translate into sustained box office. The gap between opening-week numbers and where things stand on day six is wide enough that distributors will be watching the first weekend closely to see if word of mouth, positive or otherwise, pulls crowds back in. For a film that arrived with TIFF applause and composer pedigree behind it, the real test now is whether critical goodwill can outrun a cooling ticket counter before it runs out of screens.
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