Vishal Krishna, who is cresting the box office with his Tamil/Telugu digital-crime thriller “Irumbhai Thirai”/”Abhimanyudu”, has proved to be a real-life hero for superstar Rajinikanth by averting a major digital crime just in time by getting an overzealous Thalaiva fan arrested in Singapore while he was pirating “Kaala”.

Vishal, who has lately become a prominent voice of the Tamil film industry and who heads Tamil Nadu Films Producers’ Council (TFPC), said: “It could have been a major crisis,” after the incident on Wednesday.”‘Kaala’ is a big film for us. Rajini Sir is coming back after two years. To our horror we got to know through our sources in Singapore that a man in the Cathay multiplex was live-streaming ‘Kaala’ on Facebook.”

Vishal and his team swung into action immediately.

“We got the man arrested after he had streamed 40 minutes of ‘Kaala’ on Facebook. (This was prior to its release in India on Thursday). The important thing was to take action without delay. That we managed to do.””It wasn’t an easy job. We had to push really hard for his arrest as this was a crime committed outside India. But now that it’s done, the arrest sends out the right signal to all potential piracy offenders who may not even be aware that they are guilty.

“Lots of people think recording scenes and songs on their phone is okay. But it is not okay. It is a serious crime. We want the potential offenders to know we have zero tolerance for piracy in any form. If we want to save the film industry we need to stop talking and start acting,” he said.

Apparently, the level of trolling and creating fake news is growing multi-fold these days with more and more social media users starting to like ‘negativity’ and ‘criticism’ than being positive and enjoying things. Here is another example.

Some miscreants wanted to make fun of struggling heroes and they have come up with the posters of the film “Gattiga Kodatha”. Though this is a fake news, some believed that this the real poster and started trolling Akkineni Nagarjuna’s nephew on Twitter for coming up with a title that best describes his position right now in the film industry.

Slowly clapping over these acts, Sushant said, “It’s one thing to troll. But to create fake news and then try to troll. Thanks for all the attention”. There is no such film coming up and the one who created that poster should feel shame for not able to understand an actor’s hard work that is put into every film no matter whether it is a hit or flop.

Sushanth recently impressed film lovers with “Chi La Sow” teaser, a film directed by hero Rahul Ravindran, and he’s waiting for right time to release the movie.

Whenever a Rajinikanth film hits the screens, it is nothing short of a festival for his fans. However, things are different with Kaala. After a mild pre-release buzz, Kaala released today in thousands of screens around the world.In the US, Rajini’s strong forte, Kaala collected USD 512K from the Wednesday night premieres. These are the gross collections for the film’s Tamil, Telugu and Hindi versions from 298 locations and some locations are yet to be reported.

Despite surpassing the half a million milestone with the premieres alone, Kaala’s opening collections fall heavily short of Kabali’s premiere collections (USD 1.925M). Kaala collecting only 1/4th of Kabali’s premieres has left the trade and fans dismayed.

Kaala’s US premiere collections are making everyone wonder if the brand Rajini is losing its shine at the box office. Rajini has stepped into active politics and some of his statements on the political issues in the state are adversely affecting his image.

This hero has absolutely bad track record given that all his recent films have failed to do well at the BO. Although he is a hard worker, his choice of films and selection of routine, commercial films have got him poor results.Yet, this hero’s influential background is something that is said to be impressing the heroines and star lets who came to industry with big hopes. Buzz is that the hero is nicely using his background to lure the girls and having great time.

While he was linked with many of his co-stars in the past, this hero’s fresh hot affair with his present co-star is wondering many industry people. While this girl is quite talented and beautiful in looks as well, industry folks are wondering how she was fallen to his tricks.

Apparently, the hero and his co-star are having good time. While their film’s shoot work is done, still both are said to be sparing time for each other. This has now reached the industry people. Let’s see how long this hero would take to change the present GF.

Praveen Sattaru’s film with Ram which was supposed to take off has been shelved. Although rumours have it that budget restraints are the issue from producers’ point and the script needed such budget from director’s end, the project finally seems to have moved to Tamil star Dhanush.

Reportedly, Praveen is toying with the idea of pitching the film’s story to Dhanush who has good base in Tamil and moderate market in Telugu (after Raghuvaran BTech).

While it’s not clear Dhanush given his go ahead or not since his directorial venture with Nagarjuna is also due, one has to wait and see whether the National-Award winning filmmaker would persuade Dhanush to do this film for him. If Praveen succeeds, certainly, it will be the first victory.

Praveen’s last film Garuda Vega got critical acclaim, but the film couldn’t earn the profits as expected due to its high budget and long delay before its release. Praveen this time is quite confident of overcoming it by roping in big star and handy production house. Let’s see.

When it comes to biopics, our heroes are little late than their Bollywood counterparts. While Bollywood has churned so many biopics already, Tollywood is just in the preliminary stage with Mahanti being their first, followed by NTR and Yaatra that will be released soon.

Apparently, Rana Daggubati was supposed to star in a couple of biopics, one of them deals with the life and times of a dreaded robber, while other one is about a famous wrestler. Yes, Rana is supposed to be the lead man of both the biopics, Stuartpuram based robber Tiger Nageswara Rao and wrestler Kodi Ramamurthy Naidu. But it looks like the actor will take up only one.

Though reasons are not known, Rana is said to have backed out from Tiger Nageswara Rao’s biopic that will be directed by Vamsi Krishna of Kittu Unnadu Jagratha fame. And latest reports suggest that hero Nani agreed to play the role as he feels that biopics will bring the best out of him.

For the uninitiated, Tiger Nageswara Rao happens to be a robber hailing from Stuartpuram village in the 70s and has broken into banks and houses in various cities of the then Andhra Pradesh. He was shot dead in 1987 after a massive encounter.

All eyes are on Rajamouli’s RRR, a multistarrer featuring NTR and Ram Charan as the main leads. This 200 crore action entertainer is going to commence from October later this year. Meanwhile, here’s the latest buzz on the movie.

Apparently, Senthil Kumar, the acclaimed cinematographer who was the eye behind Rajamouli’s biggest visual wonders like Magadheera, Eega and the Baahubali franchise, is rumored to be not part of RRR. Senthil has been Rajamouli’s right-hand ever since their association began more than a decade ago and naturally, Senthil not working on a huge project like RRR is a big surprise.

But here’s a much bigger surprise. It is being said that Rajamouli has roped in a popular cinematographer who has a decent experience of working in Indian and foreign movies. Speculations are rife that Mahanati’s DOP Dani is going to shoot RRR. However, all these rumours will be laid to rest once an official announcement is made sometime in July.

From the last couple of weeks, actually hour glass siren Ileana D’Cruz is touring the Fiji islands once again to promote that country as their tourism ambassador in India. And then, if it is islands, who want to miss to go underwater and search for fish?

Snorkelling into the ocean waters, a bikini-clad Ileana is seen trying to find fish. She says, “Fiji has over 1,200 species of fish. I’m trying to find Nemo’s Fijian cousins” while sharing a photograph shot at the bottom of the ocean. This is the second time Ileana went to Fiji and spent a happy time there.

Earlier she has come up with a promotional tourism film of her tour and that was aired on different lifestyle channels. It looks like despite having no big film offers in hand in Bollywood, Ileana is keeping herself busy with these other works. Cut to her Tollywood career, she is going to restart it very soon through Raviteja’s upcoming film Amar Akbar Antony being directed by Sreenu Vaitla.