The excited and anxious team behind Shankar’s long-awaited opus 2.0, featuring Rajinikanth and Akshay Kumar in confrontational combat, has just completed editing the footage. And the playing-time for the sequel to the 2010 hit is precisely two hours and 28 minutes.
This is 33 minutes shorter than Robot and its Tamil version Enthiran back in 2010. Says a member of the technical team, “Though we shot footage that could go into a five-hour film, we consciously decided to keep the length in check this time. While the first film was over three hours long, this time we’ve kept the running-time to under two and a half hours.”
The entire team felt that lengthier films tend to exhaust audiences. The most recent case in point being Thugs of Hindostan. A technical member of the 2.0 team avers, “I strongly believe the length was a major culprit in Thugs of Hindostan. If they had restricted the action to just over two hours, it would have performed a lot better. We don’t want to make the same mistake.”
