Nani's action drama is holding strong in Telangana thanks to a festival boost but is bleeding money everywhere else, trade sources tracking the weekend numbers say.
Three days in, The Paradise is behaving like two different films depending on which region you're counting.
The Nani-Srikanth Odela action drama, their second outing together after Dasara, opened Thursday on a strong note across the board. But the reviews that followed were rough, and by Friday the fault lines were already showing.
In Telangana, none of that seems to matter much. The film has held its opening-day strength through the weekend, helped in no small part by Vinayaka Nimajjanam falling on Friday, a holiday that kept footfalls up when word of mouth alone might have dragged numbers down. Telugu360's weekend tracking suggests distributors in the region are on course to recover what they put in.
Cross into Andhra Pradesh, though, and the story flips. Paid premieres there got a poor response, and collections dropped soon after. Telugu360 reports the film is now looking at a loss in AP and, going by current trends, across every other market too.
Outside the Telugu states, the picture is worse. The Paradise opened to a muted response and, unlike in Telangana, showed no real growth as the weekend went on. Overseas, the film had a genuinely big opening, the kind that usually sets up a strong multi-day run. That didn't happen here. Once mixed reactions started doing the rounds online, the overseas numbers cooled off fast.
The criticism itself has been fairly specific. Anirudh's background score, usually a reliable asset for a film like this, hasn't landed the way expected. Kayadu Lohar's role has drawn sharp reactions too, with a chunk of the audience response singling it out as a weak link. Telugu360's assessment is blunt: this was a chance for Srikanth Odela to build on the goodwill from Dasara, and by their read, it's one that's slipping away.
The money involved isn't small either. Producer Sudhakar Cherukuri put serious capital behind The Paradise, betting on the scale of the mounting and the Nani-Odela pairing to carry it past a rough critical reception. Telangana's numbers give the film some cover. The rest of the map doesn't.
What happens next depends on how the film holds through its first week, particularly outside Telangana where there's been no bounce so far. If the AP and non-Telugu numbers don't stabilise by midweek, the losses Telugu360 is flagging could widen further, and the overseas run, already cooling, will be the one to watch for signs of a full recovery or a continued slide.
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