Telugu movies that tanked at the Box Office

The year 2022 didn’t fare too well for a few much-hyped films.

Hyderabad: Telugu cinema industry has dominated the box-office this year with an amazing set of movies — both big budget and small budget — like ‘RRR’, ‘Karthikeya 2’, ‘Sita Ramam’, ‘Major’, ‘Oke Oka Jeevitam’ and others, which went on to become superhits and did their fair lot to get audiences back into the theatres.

However, the year has also served as an eye-opener for many producers and filmmakers with outdated approaches as some of the highly-anticipated movies tanked at the box office. Here is a list of some movies that were well promoted before they were released, yet had terrible box office results.

Radhe Shyam

Following the success of the magnum-opus ‘Baahubali’, this is Prabhas’ second consecutive pan-Indian flop. The period love drama, which also starred Pooja Hegde alongside Prabhas, was released with extremely high hopes but fell short of the mark due to its weak plot, unrealistic logic, and missing emotion.

Liger

Marking Vijay Deverakonda’s first pan-Indian and Hindi debut, ‘Liger’, directed by Puri Jagannadh was filmed with a budget of over Rs 100 crore. The film was a massive disaster at box office and was heavily criticised for its misogynistic narrative, confounding climax, and, of course, bland writing.

Acharya

Produced by Ram Charan, this Chiranjeevi’s flick was made with a whopping budget of Rs 140 crore. However, the film opened to highly negative reviews from critics who criticised the predictability, boring and outdated screenplay, and poor VFX.

F3: Fun and Frustration

Directed by Anil Ravipudi, ‘F3’ is a successor to the film ‘F2’, and is nothing more than offensive misogyny camouflaged as comedy. Although the former had some decent box-office returns, the latter had blown it by overdoing the clowning acts and nonsensical narrative.

Khiladi

After delivering a superhit with ‘Krack’ in 2021, it seemed that actor Ravi Teja was back to his element with his fans holding high hopes for ‘Khiladi’. However, the action-crime drama was poorly received by critics and audiences alike for a variety of reasons, including a distracted narrative, mind-boggling and illogical twists, and non-engaging screenplay.