Kamal Haasan old script is Thug Life - Treatment Mani style / Thudarm costly mistake

After the story of Thug Life has been revealed, we come to know that actually the story and script was written by Kamal Haasan almost two decades back. After Mani Ratnam read this, he decided to go further and both of them together co- wrote close 20% of the screenplay.

The film line looks close to Chekka Chivantha Vaanam. ( CVV). The story of that film is about an aged Don who finds out that one of his 3 sons was the one who attacked him. Between all of this, the concept of it is how the brothers fight among each other, and how a 4th man, an apparent dishonest police officer, comes into play, and how everything was his sketched plan to eliminate the whole family. In CVV there was so many distractions that the core plot got lost. In Thug Life the father- son conflict is just one dimension of the subject. The bound script of what is now called Thug Life was finished over 40 years ago. Kamal Haasan and Mani Ratnam were supposed to collaborate in 2002 for a film based on the Rashomon Effect. But the collaboration didn’t materialize, and the concept later developed to become Virumaandi in 2004.

The treatment to gangsterism in Thug Life will be different from his films - Thalapathi, CCV, and even Raavanan. It moves away from the style of grand songs- action and drama added to it. The film will cover the heated drama between the gangster family and will also cover the dirty politics of the outside world. There are many surprising things in this film, one of them is how responsibly and genuinely they have crafted the Father and Son bond, which has been very well done by Kamal and Simb

Thudarum makers who played down the publicity of the film did a blunder by not reeleasing the Tamil version of it at the same time. The reviews for the film with subtitles is good. Given that in Kerala the film collected Rs 28 crores in 3 days, the Tamil print would have taken it to Rs 100 cr club. The Telugu version is doing very well.

In the first three days, Thudarum earned Rs 28 crore gross in India, out of which it collected Rs 20 crore gross in Kerala. The film earned Rs 40 crore from the overseas collections, taking the worldwide gross collections to Rs 68 crore. This means that the Mohanlal-starrer has scored the second biggest opening weekend in Malayalam cinema, overtaking Prithviraj Sukumaran-starrer Aadujeevitham, that earned Rs 64.85 crore in its four-day opening weekend in 2024