The prospects of Kannada cinema have been quite abysmal this year, with only a couple of films striking a chord with audiences and making money at the box office. For the rest, it was a struggle, even when they had good reviews and positive word-of-mouth from those who had seen them. One such film was Dheekshith Shetty’s sci-fi flick Blink, an experimental movie by a young team that released along with 5-6 other Kannada films and had a massive struggle for screens/shows in its initial days.

HD print of Blink leaked

The film’s team persevered and managed to keep it in theatres for about 50 days, by which time they got an OTT deal as well with Amazon Prime Video. The film, we are told, was uploaded on to the streamer a couple of days ago, but there’s been no update as to when it would be made public for audiences. However, earlier today, multiple piracy sites had links with what appeared to be a crystal-clear HD print of the film, prompting industry trackers to wonder if the film was out on OTT.

A search on Prime Video yielded no result, so when we checked in with producer AJ Ravichandra, he confirmed that a ‘web-rip’ copy was being circulated and that he was working with an anti-piracy organization to take the links down. “The film is not out on Prime yet, but it’s been leaked already. I really don’t know how that happened, but financially it will affect us if people don’t watch it on the streamer,” says Ravichandra, who’s got a pay-per-view deal and every minute counts. 

Blink, directed by debutant Srinidhi Bengaluru, features Dheekshith Shetty in the lead, along with Gopalkrishna Deshpande, Vajradheer Jain, Chaithra J Achar, among others. The film follows Dheekshith’s character Apurva, whose attempts to find out what really happened to his father leads him to uncover a very uncomfortable truth. Besides time travel, the film also explored the Oedipus Complex, which was novel for Kannada audiences.

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