Hours before Ranabaali opened worldwide on 16 October, a court in Bengaluru granted an ex parte injunction naming X Corp, YouTube, Google India, Facebook India, Meta Platforms, BookMyShow and IMDb, restraining the circulation of false and defamatory content about the film and its producer. The producer is Mythri Movie Makers. The defendants also include unidentified John Doe parties, which is how you sue people you cannot name.
LiveLaw reports the court held that “the plaintiff had made out a prima facie case for grant of ex parte temporary injunction”. The producer’s case, as recorded, was that “this was a premeditated move to diminish the commercial viability of the film”. The matter is listed for 6 November.
The application also asked for takedown or de-indexing of specific URLs and comments, and for preservation of account information, IP logs and metadata. LiveLaw does not confirm those additional directions were granted, so we are not reporting that they were.
Look at the defendant list again
X, YouTube, Google and Meta in a defamation suit is now routine. BookMyShow and IMDb is not.
Those two are not conduits for anonymous abuse. They are where audience ratings and user reviews for a film live, and where a prospective ticket buyer goes to find out whether a film is any good. Naming them as defendants in a pre-release injunction about content concerning the film puts the audience rating system inside the scope of a court order obtained by the film’s producer.
To be precise, because the distinction matters: the order as reported restrains false and defamatory content, not criticism. Nobody has told a reviewer they cannot write a bad review, and a producer facing a coordinated smear campaign has a real grievance and a real right to sue. Organised negative-review brigading against Indian films is a documented phenomenon and it does damage.
But the mechanism here should give anyone pause. The order was obtained ex parte, meaning the platforms had no chance to respond, timed to the hours before release, which is exactly the window in which word of mouth forms. Whether a particular comment is a coordinated falsehood or an honest viewer saying the film is bad is a question that takes evidence to answer. An injunction granted before the film has even been seen cannot have answered it.
And a gap we are going to name
LiveLaw does not say which court passed this order, or which judge. There is no case number in the reporting.
That is not a complaint about LiveLaw, which published what it had. It is a problem with the order being this hard to see. A civil court in Bengaluru has issued directions binding on seven of the largest platforms in the world, and the public record of it is a single report that cannot identify the bench. If an order reaches that far, it should be findable.
The part the producer will not enjoy
Ranabaali underperformed anyway.
Sacnilk’s figures put it at roughly ₹55.35 crore India net, ₹64.30 crore India gross, ₹12.15 crore overseas, and about ₹76.45 crore worldwide. The territory split is lopsided even for a Telugu release: ₹55.40 crore gross from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, ₹6.63 crore from Karnataka, ₹1.28 crore from the rest of India and under a crore from Tamil Nadu. One structural reason for that is in the record rather than in the discourse: the Hindi and other dubbed versions were delayed to 23 October, a week after the Telugu release, so the non-Telugu markets had no film to see on opening weekend.
Reported budgets for the film run around ₹120 crore, and we flag that as reported rather than verified, because no outlet we checked sources it. On that figure the arithmetic is not kind.
The honest reading is that a Vijay Deverakonda and Rashmika Mandanna film with Mythri behind it landed the day after Jailer 2, with its dubs held back a week, and the market gave its verdict. You cannot injunct your way out of that.
Bengaluru Baath Take
We have spent this month writing about courts granting broad orders to famous plaintiffs against defendants who do not turn up. This is the same pattern applied to criticism of a product rather than to a person’s face, and it is the version that should bother a publication like this one most directly.
The chain of reasoning Indian film producers are building is worth stating plainly, because it has a destination. Negative talk reduced our takings. Negative talk was therefore coordinated. Coordinated negative talk is defamation. Therefore a court should order the platforms to suppress it before release. Every step in that is arguable and not one of them has been argued, because the only defendants who would contest it are anonymous and the named platforms would rather process a notice than litigate.
Here is the test we would apply, and we would accept it being applied to us. If a producer can show a paid or coordinated campaign, with evidence, go after it hard, and we will cover that case sympathetically. If what is actually being suppressed is a few thousand people saying a film is not worth ₹450, that is not defamation, that is the market, and a court is the wrong place to take it.
Six November. We would like to know which court, and we would like the platforms to say something.
