Six Indian films open on 6 November. Between the two biggest of them, Nayanthara’s Mookuthi Amman 2 and Suriya’s Scene, the combined India advance is about ₹83 lakh.
Ramayana’s advance is ₹111.89 crore.
That is the Diwali weekend in one comparison, and it explains why Om walked away from this window back in early October rather than take a number.
The pre-sales, such as they are
Mookuthi Amman 2, per Sacnilk on the morning of 4 November: ₹56.81 lakh gross across all dates, ₹23.21 lakh excluding blocked seats, 36,110 tickets, 875 shows. Opening day accounts for ₹27.82 lakh from 397 shows. Average ticket price ₹157. It is one hundred percent Tamil, with five 3D shows and a single EPIQ show in the entire country.
Scene, per Sacnilk the previous evening: ₹26.03 lakh gross, but only ₹2.29 lakh excluding blocked seats, from 17,971 tickets across 364 shows. The split is the interesting part: Telugu ₹16.42 lakh against Tamil ₹9.61 lakh. A Suriya film is currently selling better in Telugu than in Tamil, at a lower average ticket price.
Filmibeat put it plainly on 3 November: “Mookuthi Amman 2 is currently ahead of Scene in terms of both advance gross and the number of tickets sold.”
Two caveats before anyone reads a verdict into this. Both figures come from the same tracker, so Filmibeat and others reporting them are not independent corroboration. And Tamil cinema books late and walks in, far more than Hindi does, so a thin advance for a Diwali Tamil release is normal rather than alarming. The number that will matter is Friday’s walk-in, not Wednesday’s booking.
The other thing working in their favour arrived on 3 November: Tamil Nadu now permits six shows a day from 6 am for a new release’s first week, and these two films are the first to use it. We wrote about that order yesterday. More shows at better hours is worth more to a film with a soft advance than to one that is already sold out.
The rest of the slate, including a Kannada film
Also on 6 November: Bhavantara, in Kannada, directed by Karthik Sharma. Appa Kutty, Tamil, with Vijay Antony, directed by Mu. Maran. Disco, Malayalam, directed by Ullas Chemban with Chemban Vinod, Lukman Avaran and Arjun Ashokan. Summer Holidays in Telugu. Plus Wild Horse Nine and The Cat in the Hat from Hollywood.
No advance booking, screen count or trailer news has surfaced for Bhavantara, Appa Kutty or Disco in the last five days. A Kannada release opening into this weekend, with Ramayana holding 95,000 shows nationally and Premada Oorali still playing in its sixth week, has a genuinely difficult Friday ahead of it.
A correction to our own story
On 21 October we led a piece with A.R. Rahman making his acting debut in Moonwalk this Diwali, and said nobody was talking about it. That piece is here.
Moonwalk is listed for 6 November on Wikipedia’s Tamil 2026 release list, with Manoj Nirmala Sreedharan directing and Prabhu Deva, Rahman, Arjun Ashokan and Yogi Babu in the cast. It does not appear on any of the three independently published 6 November slates we checked this week, from Pinkvilla, Filmibeat or Onmanorama.
We have found no report of a postponement and no advance booking data for it. So one of two things is true: the film has quietly moved, or three outlets have left it off their lists. We cannot tell you which, and we should not have led a headline on a date that rested on a single list. If you were planning your Friday around it, check before you book.
And one for 20 November
On 4 November a Delhi High Court division bench of Acting Chief Justice Nitin Wasudeo Sambre and Justice Sanjay Sharma declined to entertain a public interest petition seeking to stay the release of Suryaa, the Sunny Deol film due on 20 November. LiveLaw has it.
The petitioners, Dr Nachiketa Bhatia and Dr Dhruv Chauhan, argued that the trailer glorifies violence against medical personnel. The Court’s line: “We see no reason to entertain the present PIL.” They were permitted to join proceedings already pending before a single judge, which is listed for 16 November.
Worth noting it was not dismissed on the merits of the complaint. It was turned away because the same question is already before another bench. Doctors objecting to a film about violence against doctors is not a frivolous grievance in a country where hospital assaults are a recurring story, and a single judge will hear it four days before release.
Bengaluru Baath Take
Diwali 2026 is not a festival of choice. It is one film and five hostages.
Ramayana took 5 November for itself and will hold the overwhelming majority of the national showcount through the weekend. The six Indian films landing on the sixth are competing for what is left, and two of them have a combined advance smaller than Ramayana’s IMAX pre-sales from 755 shows.
The one genuinely useful thing to come out of this week for those films is the Tamil Nadu show order, which gives a soft-advance film more chances to find an audience on the day. That is worth more to Scene and Mookuthi Amman 2 than any amount of marketing, and it is a reminder that exhibition policy decides more outcomes than taste does.
We will report the actuals, with the tracker named. And we will find out whether A.R. Rahman is in a cinema on Friday or not.
