‘PANIPAT’ RE-EDITED… BUT TO WHAT AVAIL? | 14 December, 2019

Ashutosh Gowariker has re-edited his labour of love, Panipat. The audience had found the period drama a tad too long with its running time of around 2 hours and 50 minutes. With collections for the historical being far lower than estimated by the makers, Gowariker rushed to the editing room. He deleted portions which were deemed to be boring and which would not come in the way of the audience understanding the film. It may have served to better the pace of the otherwise slow film but it hasn’t helped at all to increase the film’s box-office collections.

The reasons for the re-editing not helping boost collections in the second week are several. For one, the deletion of the boring scenes has happened too late. In the first week of the film’s run, the harm had already been done by the negative publicity generated by people who had found the film excruciatingly long. Secondly, deleting scenes with a running time of around 10 minutes from the film was just not enough. The film needed to be shorter by about 20-25 minutes at least, which would never have been possible after the release. Thirdly, length was just one of the many problems with the film. The boring content, Arjun Kapoor’s portrayal of the main protagonist, lack of interest among the youth, in Indian history are other reasons why Panipat bombed right from the word ‘go’.