It's 4 am in the morning, before sunrise at Chennai's Rohini cinema, a single-screen cinema in North Chennai. Petta (Subbaraj 2019), Rajinikanth's latest film, is being released. Petta must share its first-day show with a parallel release of Ajith-starred Viswasam (Siva 2019). A cloud of smartphones hovers over the crowd, taking selfies in every direction. The traditional media, including various news channels from Tamil Nadu and some national channels, cover the release, too. They pursue the crowd into the courtyard of the cinema wherever a small group of men commence to act like ‘real fanatic’ fans. Once the film is running, people come out again to watch the small video bites they have captured on their smartphones with their friends. The translucent green of WhatsApp messages lights up on the court here and there. Then, for about an hour, the courtyard calms down until the next crowd starts to arrive: Ajith fans. They pour milk and beer over the banners, they throw flowers and paper snippets around and light firecrackers. The beat of the live drum makes several young men dance, and even more men capture the scene with their video cameras or smartphones. At 6.30 am, the crowd throngs inside the cinema and the excitement and energy of the courtyard dies out again. Two major film stars, two major releases. Traditionally, Pongal, Tamil New Year, has been an important date for film releases, yet two fan groups crowding the same cinema at the same times still creates an unusual scene. The Ajith banners clearly outnumber those for Rajinikanth. Playfully, Ajith fans remove the balloons and flags with which the Rajinikanth fans decorated the premises and the crowd cheers for these iconoclastic acts. In other cinemas in the city, I learn the next day, fans of the two actors fought verbally as they tried to tear each other's banners; elsewhere six young men got critically injured after a cutout of Ajith collapsed while they were performing a milk abhishekam. The newspaper reviews of the two films and their reception at the cinemas are telling. The Hindu, Chennai's main English-language newspaper, spends the entire second page on the release (Staff reporter 2019).