Thanks to the success of Avengers, we were given very poor show timings: Hansal Mehta on Omerta collection

As Rajkummar Rao-starrer Omerta opened to a slow start on Friday, filmmaker Hansal Mehta said his film got “poor show timings” due to the ongoing success of Hollywood blockbuster Avengers Infinity War.

“Thanks to the ongoing success of Avengers we were given very poor show timings. There was not a show that suited the conventional audience. Plus there is the ‘Adults’ censor certification. That automatically puts off a major chunk of the audience,” Mehta said.

After making an opening collection of Rs 54 lakh on Friday, Omerta earned Rs 1.09 crore, making a total of Rs 1.64 crore in two days of the release.

Omerta is based on the life of British terrorist Omar Shaikh Saeed and the major terror incidents he was involved in - killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl and the kidnapping of foreign tourists in India.

There is a harrowing sequence in Hansal Mehta’s Omerta where the leading man Rajkummar Rao’s car was stopped at a check-post and he was called to step out by a burly policeman who wanted to know if he was a Muslim or married to a Muslim. Mehta said he too had faced such cultural discrimination once.

“It is the beard. There was a time when I used to keep a beard. My music guru Ghulam Mustafa Khan asked me not to keep a beard because it made me look like a Muslim. None of his sons were allowed by him to keep a beard as he didn’t want his children to be identified by their beard as Muslims. That experience stayed with me. I used it in Omerta,” Mehta said.

“It’s a frightening situation where the young Muslim men would not want to keep a beard for the fear of religious identification whereas Hindus would also shun the beard for the same reason. The beard may eventually become a thing of the past,” he said.

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)

Follow @htshowbiz for more