The Paradise on Netflix Is 24 Minutes Shorter Than the Cinema Cut, and Nani's Biggest Hit Still Divides People

Photo: iMahesh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Paradise arrived on Netflix on October 22, four weeks after its September 24 release, in Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. The interesting part is that it is not the same film. The streaming cut runs about two and a half hours against two hours fifty-four in cinemas, a dance sequence is gone, and some scenes were reworked after the criticism the theatrical version took for its length and its violence.

The box office tells the story of a film that opened enormous and then fell off a cliff. Around Rs 77 crore worldwide on day one, about Rs 173 crore in total, with Rs 142 crore from India and Rs 31 crore overseas. It is Nani's biggest film by a distance and it still reads as an underperformer against a budget that was reportedly between Rs 150 and 200 crore, though nobody ever confirmed the number.

Photo: Silverscreen.in, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I saw it in a cinema and I was in the middle on it. Nani is tremendous, doing a kind of feral, wounded physicality he has never been asked for before. Anirudh's score is a weapon. But the film is long, it is relentlessly brutal, and the second half loses the thread of the slum-politics story it set up so well. A tighter cut might honestly be the better version, which is not something I often say about a director's film being trimmed for streaming.

Photo: Surajram Kumaravel, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you saw it in cinemas, the Netflix version is worth a second look to see what changed. If you skipped it, the shorter cut is the one to start with. Did the violence put you off, or was it the length?