Female-fronted Hichki takes on two issues

“There’s no escaping these monstrous invaders, I tell you,” jokes filmmaker Sudhir Mishra, whose Daas Dev, which was due on March 23, has made a hasty escape to a safer week in April.

But Yash Raj Films doesn’t mind taking on Pacific Rim Uprising, the sequel to the 2013 alien monsters versus earthly robots sci-fi spectacle, directed by Guillermo del Toro. The director has since then moved onto the Oscar-winning Shape of Water, but the audiences are still stuck on the Pacific Rim formula.

The sequel, directed by Steven S. DeKnight, is being unleashed in four languages in India — English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. On the other hand, the unitongued Hindi release Hichki must rely on word of mouth.

Hichki is a movie about the value attached to the spoken word, as the female hero Rani Mukerji is shown dealing with Tourette syndrome. That’s just the beginning of Hichki’s issues, though. Besides having to clash with Pacific Rum Uprising, it must also tackle the Indian audiences’ acceptance of female heroes.

For all the talk of women empowerment, female-fronted films are still not necessarily widely favoured at the box office. So much so that even Wonder Woman didn’t do as well in India as it did the world over.

As for Rani’s last movie Mardaani, which featured her as a shero, it did average business too.