Should team Head Bush be worried about the Kantara effect?

It wouldn't be far-fetched to claim that Kantara is the new official 'global export' of Kannada cinema. Ahead of its release about two weeks ago, the prospects for the film at the box office looked bright, no doubt, but the extent of its reach and fandom can certaintly be termed as unprecedented. Rishab Shetty, the man behind the mayhem, is the talk of every single town now with distributors, exhibitors, and PR agencies of the highest repute singing only praises for him. And to make it all better, Kantara is being wholeheartedly regarded as a KANNADA film and not loosely categorized as a 'pan-India' venture, which only goes to prove that Rishab's gamble to release in Kannada alone has paid off.

But what does Kantara mean to the Kannada Film Industry? Aside from the fact that the film has yielded tremendous box office results, the audiences are also in awe of its technical finesse, the employment of folklore and subtext, and, of course, the performances. The terms Bootha Kola, Lord Guliga, and the likes have become ubiquitous across the country and much of it is, and can be, attributed to Rishab Shetty's superb on-screen performance: the final 20 minutes of Kantara, in particular, transcended the film to new, unimaginable heights and it still remains one of the main contributors to its success. 

So, in this vein, do the upcoming Kannada releases find themselves on thin ice and worrying about the Kantara effect? Has Kantara redefined the quality standards for the Kannada cinema audiences?

Allu Aravind on Kantara: 'A film like this makes me want to learn more about films and storytelling' 

The first case study, so to speak, in this regard would be Daali Dhananjaya's Head Bush. Head Bush has been touted all along as a model, new-age gangster film which is likely to push the envelope in the genre with Daali Dhananjaya, a model superstar himself, at the forefront of things (as both actor and producer). The stage, for Head Bush, seems set perfectly considering that Kantara has beckoned the audiences back to cinema halls and an air of sudden optimism now surrounds Kannada cinema. And yet, the film is likely to carry an additional pressure of living up to the ongoing hype and should Daali Dhananjaya & co. fall short of the promise even by any margin, the results might not be the most favourable to them.

Daali Dhananjaya and team Head Bush visit Puneeth Rajkumar's memorial 

In recent times, one has seen films Vikrant Rona succumb to this phenomenon wherein, despite the credible reviews online, the film could not live up the standards it seemed to have set. The post-Covid scenario has seen this pattern be accentuated more than ever as word-of-mouth publicity has now become a major factor for the eventual commercial success of a film. Thereby, it would be interesting to see how Head Bush fares in these exciting times and whether, or not, the film's performance allows for a new trend to emerge in the industry.

Head Bush has been directed by debutant Shoonya with Agni Shreedhar writing the screenplay based on his own novel titled My Days in the Underworld: Rise of the Bangalore Mafia. The trailer of the film will be released on October 16 at a grand event held in Davanagere with Rachita Ram, Ramya, and others attending it as chief guests. The cast of Head Bush includes Dhanajaya, Vasistha N. Simha, Sruthi Hariharan, Raghu Mukherjee, Yogesh, V. Ravichandran, and many others - Dhananjaya also produces the film under Daali Pictures in association with Somanna Talkies.