Lokah: Chapter 1-Chandra, starring Dulquer Salmaan, has achieved remarkable box office success, crossing Rs 100 crore. Co-writer Santhy Balachandran revealed that the film, initially a risky proposition due to its female lead, gained momentum with Dulquer Salmaan’s support. He encouraged the team to develop a larger universe, starting with a female superhero to introduce the audience to the broader world.
Dulquer Salmaan, Dominic Arun, Kalyani Priyadarshan and Naslen’s Lokah: Chapter 1-Chandra has been charting box office history since the day of its release. It has become the third Malayalam film to cross the Rs 100 crore mark and is the 12th biggest hit of 2025. Pages and pages on the internet are filled with fan theories with everyone assuming how the makers are going to take the story ahead.
In a recent interview with The News Minute the co-writer of the film Santhy Balachandran opened up about the entire process and how they were lucky to get the backing of Dulquer Salmaan. She said,“I think Dominic just wanted to make a film that he would want to watch. And we were all very convinced by his vision. And he’s been very patient, it’s been an eight year journey for him since Tharangam( 2017) released and Lokah was not an easy film to pitch in to get investors on board because the conventional wisdom is that a woman led film will not get the audience. So it was a risky proposition, but we were lucky to get Dulquer Salmaan on board”.Explaining how the association has been with Dulquer she said, “He really understood the larger potential this universe holds and he was really excited about it and encouraged us to kind of go back to the drawing board and develop the next few parts to have clarity on where this is going properly before we start filming the first one.”She also shared that it was a planned decision to start the universe with a female superhero, she said , “We could have maybe started with a male superhero as well. But this was the original idea. It was meant to be a standalone film and then it then became a franchise. And I think everyone was really okay with the idea of starting with this film.And I think also the idea is that this is the film that introduces the audience to the larger world. So it needed the level of grounding as well. And that happens through the characters of the boys.”
