There are more releases on October 7 than sanity can handle, and one of them is the latest attempt by godman Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh to prove that he has what it takes to be a superstar.
MSG The Warrior – Lion Heart is the third in the series of films celebrating the talents and achievements of the head of the Dera Sacha Sauda cult. MSG The Messenger and MSG 2: The Messenger were both released in 2015 by Singh’s company, Hakikat Entertainment, and apart from attracting savage reviews and all-round ridicule, they seemed to have achieved little more.
The movies were elaborate propaganda videos aimed at Singh’s vast following, which dutifully crowded theatres to receive sermons that could easily have been delivered at a Dera Sacha Sauda retreat. The new movie is an entertainer and not a proselytisation tool, promised distributor CP Arora, who has also handled the previous two releases. “In this film, he is playing a fictional character for the first time and not a guru,” Arora told Scroll.in. “This is an entertainer, full of romance and masala.”
Singh plays a secret agent with infinite powers who saves the world from social evils and an alien attack. The religious leader’s look has changed – he has a new haircut, for one thing – while his antics are in line with Hollywood superhero films. Singh has at least 30 credits in the movie, including dialogue and visual effects. The running time is 120 minutes, compared to three hours for the last two releases.
MSG The Warrior – Lion Heart is being released during a week in which there are at least 15 releases across languages, including Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Mirzya and the Hollywood titles Queen of Katwe and The Girl on the Train. Arora hopes to release the film on as many as 3,000 screens – just like any A-list production. “I got a lot of inquiries based on the trailer itself,” Arora said.
The scale of the release is not as preposterous as it sounds: the movie can occupy as many screens as it wants if it settles for a single show in a day. (Reliable figures for the screen count and box office of the first two films are not available.) Despite the outlandishness of Singh’s cinematic experiments, his productions make business sense for exhibitors. The average moviegoer might not care for MSG’s exploits, but he has enough followers to crowd the ticket windows and fill the halls, a marketing executive who was associated with the godman’s previous productions said on the condition of anonymity.
“How does it matter if he is making films as long as somebody is watching them,” the executive said. “He has a huge and well organised base, and there is a model here of converting followers into ticket buyers that works beautifully for the theatres. It’s like Apple promoting content for their millions of subscribers – it’s the same principle.”
By publicising his social service activities through his films, the godman is trying to sign up new recruits, the executive added. Singh is branching out into organised retail, merchandise and cosmetics. “The films are a way of reaching out to more and more followers and attracting people who might not be otherwise interested,” the executive said.
If Baba Ramdev could, so can Gurmeet Singh.