Hindi Medium release date postponed to May 19, 2017, clashes with Half Girlfriend

Hindi Medium release date pushed back to avoid clash with Sarkar 3 and Meri Pyaari Bindu

The release of Irrfan Khan’s Hindi Medium has been pushed back by one week, and the film is now slated to open on May 19th against Half Girlfriend, starring Shraddha Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor. The previously decided May 12, 2017 release date would have meant a clash with the openings of Ayushmann Khurrana and Parineeti Chopra’s Meri Pyaari Bindu, as well as Amitabh Bachchan’s Sarkar 3. That’s a big business risk to take as all three are commercially successful actors and Irrfan Khan’s niche movie, Hindi Medium may have gotten overshadowed by the two.

According to Hindi Medium producers Dinesh Vijan and Bhushan Kumar, the decision to postpone the release was simply to give an extra week to the film’s promotions. Along with Irrfan, they said they are very happy and proud of the final product, and are excited ahead of the launch. They felt that the film deserves more time to be promoted, so that it reaches out to a wider audience.

Hindi Medium also marks the Bollywood debut of Pakistani actress Saba Qamar, who stars in the lead role opposite Irrfan Khan. Together they are a young couple living in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, struggling to get their daughter into a good English medium school, while themselves trying to break through to society’s upper strata. We’ll soon see whether audiences prefer the romantic love story of Half Girlfriend, or Irrfan Khan’s typically hysterical one-liners in Hindi Medium, when they go head to head in the box office in just two weeks.