Warner Bros Discovery's India theatrical chief revealed the Hollywood sleeper hit skipped a day-and-date launch, opened during IPL season and let word of mouth do the selling.
Obsession wasn't supposed to work in India. That's the starting point Denzil Dias, VP and Managing Director - India Theatrical at Warner Bros Discovery, offered at FICCI Frames 2026 in Mumbai, where he broke down the distribution playbook behind one of the year's more surprising Hollywood numbers.
The film, speaking on a panel titled 'Cinema at Crossroads - The Rules of the Big Screen' alongside Ayushmann Khurrana and director Sriram Raghavan, eventually did close to 12 times its opening weekend collection at the Indian box office, according to Dias. That's the kind of legs distributors dream about and almost never get.
The strategy started with a decision to break from habit. Dias said Warner Bros Discovery's films typically release day-and-date with the US, but Obsession didn't. "We took a very deliberate decision not to release it simultaneously with the US," he said, pushing the India date back by two weeks.
And then came the part that sounds like a mistake on paper. The film opened while IPL matches were live, a window most distributors avoid because cricket eats into cinema footfall. Dias said the timing was deliberate precisely because nothing else major was competing for screens at that point. Week one opened on roughly 300 screens, not a wide release by any measure.
The marketing held back too. Obsession came from a filmmaker and cast largely unfamiliar to Indian audiences, so conventional promotional pushes weren't going to land. Dias said the team chose to wait instead, letting international conversation around the film build first and travel to India on its own rather than forcing it.
Once the film was out, the job changed. "Once the film released, our entire focus shifted to word of mouth," Dias said, describing a strategy that leaned on amplifying audience reaction rather than continuing to sell the film upfront. Curiosity built through the US buzz reportedly converted into Indian audiences discovering the film gradually over its run, not in one opening burst.
Dias framed this as the larger lesson for theatrical releases now: identify the audience, meet them where they already are, then match distribution and show timings to that demand. "It's not just about the great films that our filmmakers make," he said, arguing that marketing and audience nurturing carry equal weight to the film itself.
The panel also touched on Hindi originals trying similar counter-programming bets, with Ayushmann Khurrana pointing to films like Hanuman Ansh as examples of the kind of cinema Indian filmmakers need to keep making. Whether Warner Bros Discovery applies the Obsession model, delayed release, minimal upfront selling, patience for word of mouth, to its bigger upcoming slate in India is the more interesting question the panel left open.
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