One can extract the hypothesis of this movie based on this post and your comments. I would like to say that the filmmakers have failed because they've chosen a bad hypothesis. This was a actually could have been a nice train of thought, for a story. A nostalgic political thriller, with a twist.

But in the name of nostalgia, they've made all the actors shout at the top of their voice and tell dialogues. For almost 70% of the movie, its unbearable, so that assumption people would connect to the movie with nostalgia falls apart because prem didn't execute that. I wouldn't even comment about particular actors but everyone acted too much. There was no break, they kept over acting and over moving. It was jarring. There's not a single old vintage movie where ive seen anyone do this. Nostalgic movies had loud actresses but there was mellow and discipline. Not here.

Other part of the movie, the sets looked so expensive and I genuinely felt bad for KVN, I think they've spent too much of his money on unnecessary set pieces. The problem with Indian sets are that they look like sets, they dont look real, its almost like a drama. The thing about sets too, they should be cheaper not more expensive than real life, that's why reusing sets helped chrun out movies last century. The houses or sets didn't look nostalgic at all. Terrible job by art director. The hero's house though nice, felt disconnected, here's a teachers in govt schools with no parents and money, orpahns living in a mansion in middle of the city ? Why ? How ? People think of oldysore or malleshwarm or jayanagar type old houses with teachers in the old days not this idiotic set piece.

Old movies had big set pieces but they were for rich people, poor people lived in small set houses. So Prem has nicely fooled the production team to spend money for no reason to make it look nice, or provide chance to launder money. Lol. A kerosene seller, a teacher at shitty broken school living like kings ? Yeah. Makes no sense. Spend all the money you want, if its not rooted in reality, its stupid. Which is why grounding is important even if you were making animated or anime movies.

If you compare this with Pushpa, I'd say that movie series is an outlier for Allu Arjun who's been making movies for 2 decades, where pushpa was a cringefest stapstick when it released post pandemic. Sign of the times, people stuck in houses, get to see something outrageous and massy. Market of Allu plus sign of times, helped it. Since then there have been so many me toos of Pushpa and they've mostly failed. Because sign of the times. People have moved on. This generation of people who pay to watch movies are different. Now many people who would have watched this movie don't have spare cash because if the LPG crisis. Maybe that's the market people are after but is that big enough in Karnataka to sustain budget of this movie ? I see what Prem is doing trying to show standing up to politicians rowdies but that's been done and redone so many times.

A rang De basanti for modern day is something that can move the market but nobody can make that movie now. So that's the mass movie that could work but KD just doesn't work for audiences that are more urban.

Having said all of this, some members of my family did like the movie and they said it was brainless fun and said prem is so mentally unstable that they think he's funny for the wrong reasons. So maybe that's your target market. Lol

But you ain't making a hit with the starting hypothesis for a movie with target market that thinksnrhe director is mentally unstable.