Box Office - Goodbye Has A Poor Weekend, Vikram Vedha Fails, PS-1 (Hindi) Brings In Added Bonus

Goodbye has flopped at the box office. The film could gather just 4 crores* in its opening weekend, which is a very poor total. To think of it, Amitabh Bachchan's last release as the central protagonist, Jhund had collected 5.58 crores at the box office. Even dubbed/bi-lingual releases like PS-1 [7.60 crores], Rocketry [5.52 crores] and Major [4.66 crores] had done better business in their opening weekend. Badhaai Do was in fact even better at 7.82 crores and that too when it was the first release post pandemic and had arrived with so many restrictions.

The very opening day for the film was a shocker as it opened at a paltry 1 crore. At the least one expected an opening day of 2-3 crores and that too was with controlled expectations. However, right from the morning shows itself the footfalls were very low. Things didn't improve during the course of the day, thought at some premium multiplexes in the big cities there were better footfalls in the evening and night shows.

Post that all eyes were on whether Saturday and Sunday would jump huge. Ideally, the collections needed to double up on Saturday to the tune of 2 crores and then further jump of at least 50% was required because that would have allowed the Sunday haul to read 3 crores. Though it wouldn't have resulted in an optimal weekend either but at least the stage would have been set for better weekdays ahead. Then in its own small way, the film could have gathered some sort of collections over a period of time. Unfortunately though, none of this happened.

The film, which also marks the Bollywood debut of south star Rashmika Mandanna, is now on a very sticky wicket and seems like the lifetime could well fold up under the 10 crores mark, which would be very saddening. More so, because Vikas Behl has made a good movie and this one deserved to do business of at least 25-30 crores. An emotional drama like this with humor in there isn't a genre that has been attempted by many films and something like this came from Bollywood after a really long time. This one should have done well.

Same is the case with Vikram Vedha as well which had all in it to do far better business than what it's doing right now. The very opening day was so underwhelming and post that nothing really worked for it when the first week folded at mere 58.57 crores. This too was helped primarily by the Dusshehra period due to which Tuesday didn't drop much after the Monday fall and then Wednesday (the day of Dusshehra) went up again. Post that though there was a downfall as Thursday collections were down and Friday went down even more.

Due to these very reasons, any hopes of revival for the film over the second weekend were quashed. Not that it was any surprising since the trend during the first weekend itself had shown that even during holidays the jumps were minimal, and hence nothing much was expected to come out of the Saif Ali Khan and Hrithik Roshan starrer in the second weekend. No wonder, even though there jumps over Saturday and Sunday, they were from much lesser levels on Friday and now after 10 days the film's collections stand at 70 crores*.

As for PS-1, it is primarily doing bumper business in the south and there it would end up raking in 200 crores, which is quite good. To think of it, the film has a huge audience in overseas due to the Tamil speaking population and hence in US, UK, UAE, Canada, Australia and south east asia the film will collect further 100 crores and more. Hence, whatever that's coming in from the Hindi version is basically an added bonus.

Of course, given the kind of marketing and promotion that the Mani Ratnam directed film had indulged in to woo the pan-India audience, ideally a lifetime of 40-50 crores should have been scored. However, even though that's not quite happening, the film will still find itself in the whereabouts of 25 crores in the final run, which is not bad either. The film has had collected 14.25 crores in its first week and now after the second weekend, it stands at 18.65 crores*. By the time the second week would come to a close, PS-1 would have gone past the 20 crores.

*Estimates. Final numbers awaited