A few days after Ai’s minute-long teaser created history by clocking over nine million (90 lakh) hits on Youtube, the producers gave fans another reason to cheer: Shankar’s much-awaited extravaganza of a film will release a week before Pongal, making it the first big release of 2015. Announcing the surprise news on Twitter, cinematographer P C Sreeram said, “January 9th we will all be blessed with ‘I’. A red letter day for Indian cinema.” The news soon got around and fans of Vikram and Shankar began talking about how the film would enjoy a larger release and run, because it was avoiding the Pongal weekend. This is good news for both Vikram and Shankar as they have been waiting for the film to see the light of day over the past couple of months.
Curiously, the news comes a few hours after Studio Green officially announced that Karthi’s rural mass entertainer Komban would also release for Pongal - in addition to Sivakarthikeyan’s Kaaki Sattai, Vishal’s Aambalai and Ajith’s Yennai Arindhaal. As more and more films began to drop their names into the hat to bag screens this Pongal, Ai’s producer Aascar Ravichandran appears to have prudently preponed the release, to leverage the maximum number of screens. “After five films release on December 25, no other films will come in on the New Year’s weekend and so there will be brisk sales for Ai and if the word-of-mouth factor is good, then it’s run may continue well into the Pongal weekend and attract crowds during the holidays,” said a source with the Tamil Film Producers Council.
Sources close to Ai’s production unit have told City Express that the film has been cut, quartered, edited and is ready to roll. In fact, all the pre-publicity rushes and material had been ready for a Deepavali launch, but the producer deferred it’s release as there were plenty of big ticket releases that could have played party pooper to the film’s BO fortunes - Kaththi and Lingaa, being the chief contenders for that crown.