Batwara 1947 and Awarapan 2 clashed at the box office on August 14. But the competition heated up even before the movies hit the screens. While Emraan Hashmi’s action drama had a stronger start — reportedly selling over 1, 20,000 tickets for the opening day against 20,000 of Sunny Deol’s partition drama — the distribution of shows has been almost equal. This has led to speculation of “unfairness” as PVR-Inox has doubled up as the distributor of director Rajkumar Santoshi’s Batwara 1947.

When mid-day reached out to Bihar-based exhibitor Vishek Chauhan for his view on the matter, he said, “I’d call it conflict of interest because naturally, PVR-Inox will push for more shows of Batwara 1947. There will be that bias.”