Box Office Update: Ajay Devgn’s Bholaa Keeps Audiences Engaged, Gumraah Flops

Box Office Update: It was a low weekend for Bollywood at the box office as collections stayed under the 15 crores mark. This is disappointing since there is a capacity of more than 50 crores available on a daily basis and the weekend translates into 150 crores. In such a scenario, to have just 15 crores come in means the entire theater business is operating at mere 10% occupancy across the country for Hindi films and that's cutting a sorry figure indeed.

Thankfully there was Bholaa around which at least brought in 11-12 crores due to which some sort of collections were accumulated. Otherwise one shudders to think how the business would have looked like if even this was not there. In fact next two weeks are going to be even lower since there is no new notable release and then footfalls at Bholaa too will start going down. This means we could well be evidencing a 10 crores weekend next before Salman Khan's Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan arrives on 21st April.

Till then it would be Bholaa which will somehow keep the audiences engaged with 72 crores* in its kitty so far with a lifetime of 85 crores looking like a possibility. As for the new release of the week, Gumraah, there was nothing really that came in. The start of the film was expectedly poor with just 1.10 crores coming in but then that too was aided by the partial holiday of Good Friday. Post that there was no real revival as the collections ended up being slow over the next two days and only 3 crores* coming in the final tally.

It is sad to see such kind of fate for Hindi films week after week, so much so that everyone has become rather immune to flops and disasters in such quick succession. The industry definitely deserves better and even this Aditya Roy Kapur and Mrunal Thakur film is not the kind of suspense thriller that should have flopped in such a miserable way. However, audiences are looking for something spectacular week after week and one just waits to see when would things return to normalcy.

*Estimates. Final numbers awaited

Note: All collections as per production and distribution sources