Home advantage isn't showing up where it should for Karthi.

Advance bookings for Sardar 2, the sequel to his 2022 spy thriller, opened with ₹2.92 crore gross in day-one sales across India, according to figures reported by Track Tollywood. That's ahead of Soori's Mandaadi, which has pulled in ₹2.27 crore all-India for the same slot. On paper, Sardar 2 is winning by ₹65 lakh.

But the split tells a different story. A chunk of that lead is coming from outside Tamil Nadu. Track Tollywood reports the Telugu states alone have already crossed ₹1 crore in advances for Sardar 2, giving Karthi's film a pan-India cushion that a straight Tamil release wouldn't normally need. Strip that out and Mandaadi, running on a fraction of the budget and none of the franchise weight, is reportedly doing better business in Tamil Nadu itself, the market Sardar 2 was supposed to own outright.

That's the twist nobody was pricing in. Sardar was a sleeper hit in 2022, the kind of film that built its own audience slowly rather than opening loud, and a sequel from Karthi carries expectations of a bigger first weekend at home. Mandaadi arrived with far less noise around it. Whatever is pulling Tamil audiences toward Soori's film over the advance-booking window, it isn't matching the pre-release buzz math would predict.

None of this is settled by lunchtime Friday, though. Advance numbers only measure who booked ahead, not who actually walks in through the day. Track Tollywood's own read is that the real contest starts once morning shows let out and word of mouth kicks in, Sardar 2 has enough of a national base to absorb a soft Tamil Nadu number if reviews are kind, and a bad first-day verdict could just as easily flip the gap the other way for Mandaadi.

Online chatter is already running hot on both fronts, with discussion threads live for both films within hours of release, spoiler tags and all, which suggests audiences turned up in numbers regardless of what the advance sheets said. Franchise talk hasn't slowed either. There's a Sardar 3 already being spoken about in the same breath as this release, going by how the conversation around Karthi's spy universe has picked up.

What happens next is straightforward enough to track. Day-one final collections, not advance figures, will settle whether Sardar 2's Tamil Nadu dip was a booking-window quirk or an actual audience preference for Mandaadi. Trade watchers should have that answer by Saturday morning, once the first full day of shows across both films is counted and reported.