Dhurandhar is looking to put up Rs. 26-27 crore nett for the first day. This number… yes, number, not collection, may grow to over Rs. 30 crore nett, subject to whether they are further pumped after the day. The pre-sales for the film were pumped extensively after midnight yesterday, with one chain going from around 95K tickets to 175K by morning. It will only be known tomorrow morning what numbers are cooked by the makers. It will be no surprise if they go all the way to Rs. 40 crore nett, because why not?
If the film had put up these numbers organically, it would have been a very good start, in fact, for all the genre limitations, it would have been an excellent start. But now… nothing meaningful can be said or analysed about this, because one can’t make sense of this madness. There was some feeding done for the film in pre-sales when the sales started, but after that, they were largely left on their own. That changed last night when the makers levelled up.
Before the pre-sales were turned into a joke, the film seemed like it was going to collect around Rs. 15 crore on its first day. That is likely the closest estimate of its real, organic audience pull. There’s no way to confirm it, but at least it offers a baseline to work with.
As a box office reporter, this is a difficult and frustrating position to be in, as you want to report the box office and have to report the numbers that are on paper, even though you know they hold no weight. It’s unclear how much and how long makers plans to continue this. The rationale for them to do so is to build the perception of a film doing well. One misses the times when reporting the inflated box office numbers in the media was a way to build perception, the real numbers were there to see in the billing. Now the billing itself is inflated/compromised, so there is no way to know the real numbers.
