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As was stressed in this column without any words being minced, it was always going to be a bad idea for half a dozen films to be released over a single weekend. There were disasters waiting to happen and this is how things progressed over the weekend gone by.
Let’s first talk about David, a film that at least released as per plan but didn’t have much going for it as far as marketing and promotion is concerned. Add to that an overall content that didn’t catch fancy of many means the film turned out to be a big downer commercially. Yes, critically a select few did have good things to say and no one bashed it in particular. That was fair as well since the film’s content did have sparks to catch one’s attention. However that was diluted by the fact that the opening was much lesser than a bare minimum 30% odd that one expected. That reflected in around 2.5 Crores that came in which is poor.
In comparison Vishwaroop still managed a decent opening of around 30%-40%, which was on predicted lines, and saw some decent escalation over the weekend as well. A well made film, though not as spectacular as the hype created around it, the Kamal Haasan starrer benefited from the controversy as well since it’s collections were better than Robot in the Hindi belt. That’s saying a lot since Rajnikanth is a much more popular name up North when compared to Haasan. Though 8 Crore weekend is still not a very huge number, it is still face saving enough. All eyes are on how it sustains for rest of the week.
Other releases of the week, Midnight’s Children, Deewana Main Deewana, Listen… Amaya and Mai… have proven to be disasters at the box office. Not even finding a proper release for themselves, they were not reviewed by most and were criminally ignored. Though a select few reviewers who saw Listen… Amaya and Mai… appreciated them for the content, zero visibility factor pulled these flicks down in a major way.
All of this benefited Race 2 which, in its second weekend, boasted of collections that were one and a half times more (15 Crores) than the sum total of all new releases (10 crores) combined together. With over 90 crores already in its kitty, the film is now comfortably headed towards the 100 crores mark, courtesy underperformance of the newer releases.
Joginder Tuteja tweets @tutejajoginder
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