Chennai Express reaches Egypt

After wowing masses all across India, UK and USA, Chennai Express opened in Egypt, yesterday. The movie is currently running in two theaters in Alexandria and eight theaters in Cairo. With this release in Egypt, Chennai Express also achieved the unique distinction of being the first movie to be released after a gap of almost 25 years in the Muslim dominated country. Bollywood movies happened to be a rage in the 80s when then Shenshah of Bollywood, Amitabh Bachchan captured the imagination of the citizens here. His movie Mard was a sleeper hit and ran for several months in Egypt. This ultimately affected the revenue of the Egyptian movies which started incurring losses as people flocked to see Hindi movies more, thereby prompting the Egyptian film industry to impose restrictions on the release of Hindi movies. A stringent rule was put in place whereby for every Indian film imported by an Egyptian distributor, he was required to export an Egyptian one. This proved to be detrimental to the distributors which eventually sounded a death knell for Hindi films there. Thankfully, now mainly due to the efforts of the Indian embassy a deal has been struck to revive Indian movies in Egypt. Meanwhile, Shah Rukh Khan sounded ecstatic at this new development. The Badshah tweeted “Was the most awesome sight when I saw the pyramids from my hotel during Suraj hua madham...and now Chennai Exp in Egypt...feels really good.” Let’s see if Chennai Express is able to whip up a storm in the land of Pharaohs.