The police drama has crossed Vismaya Mohanlal's Thudakkam in India collections and now has Dulquer Salmaan's I'm Game in its sights with less than a crore to go.
Twenty-two days in, and Pradhama Drishtya Kuttakkar is still finding new money. Parvathy Thiruvothu's police drama opened its fourth week with 43 lakh net on Friday, according to Koimoi, pushing its domestic total to 24.73 crore net, which works out to roughly 29.18 crore gross.
That's enough to get past Vismaya Mohanlal's Thudakkam, which closed its India run at 24.26 crore. Thudakkam was the Mohanlal-backed debut that had been sitting as a benchmark for female-led Mollywood releases this year. Kuttakkar has now quietly stepped past it, which Koimoi's report flags as making it 2026's highest-grossing female-led film out of Kerala so far.
The film isn't done climbing either. It needs under a crore more to overtake Dulquer Salmaan's I'm Game, and at its current pace that could happen over this very weekend, its fourth.
What's striking here isn't the scale, it's the stamina. This is a film running with limited shows outside Kerala, no overseas push to speak of, and a story that doesn't scream opening-weekend event. Aleena, played by Parvathy, joins the police force on a compassionate appointment after her husband's death. A routine detention goes wrong when a scuffle with a hardened criminal forces four officers to cover up what happened. There's no star vehicle grammar to this, no franchise weight. It's just been earning through word of mouth for three weeks straight, and now a fourth.
Director Shahad, who made Prakashan Parakkatte in 2022 and Anuragam in 2023, doesn't have a blockbuster track record to lean on. The screenplay comes from P. S. Subramanian and Vijesh Thottingal, and Arjun Selva has bankrolled it under 11 Icons Film Productions. None of these names move the needle the way a big banner or a big hero would. And yet here's the film, outlasting a Mohanlal-backed debut on pure legs.
Mathew Thomas and Sidharth Bharathan round out a cast that's been doing the heavy lifting without a single viral trailer moment or controversy to ride on. If there's a lesson in the Kuttakkar run, it's that Mollywood's mid-budget, content-first films still have an audience willing to show up in week four, not just on opening Friday.
The I'm Game number is the one to watch now. If Kuttakkar clears it over this weekend, it closes out October having beaten two very different kinds of Malayalam releases, a star-kid debut and an established-actor vehicle, on the strength of nothing but sustained word of mouth.
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