ANN/THE STATESMAN – Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan and southern superstar Nayanthara have set the box office on fire with their latest release, Jawan. This vigilante action film amassed a staggering INR22,865,600,000 in India during its first four days in theatres.
The movie, featuring Vijay Sethupathi as the antagonist, made its debut on September 7, making an impressive INR750,000,000 in India on the opening day alone. Globally, it raked in over INR1,500,000,000 on its first day, according to the film trade website Sacnilk.
However, the momentum took a slight dip the following day, with a 29.03 per cent decrease in collections, resulting in INR532,300,000 in net earnings in India across all languages.
But, with the weekend the film swung back in action as it raked in INR778,300,000 net and INR805,000,000 net on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.
The weekend gave a huge boost to the film’s collections with additional collections coming in from the national capital due to the Group of 20 (G20) shutdown as people flocked to theatres in the view of closure of shopping and food establishments.
The film, which marks director Atlee pan-India debut, collected INR3,846,900,000 worldwide in three days making it the third Bollywood film of 2023 to breach the INR3,000,000,000 mark after the Sunny Deol-starrer Gadar 2 and Shah Rukh Khan’s earlier release from this year Pathaan.
It is only expected to solidify its position at the box-office in coming days given that the film is running across almost 5,000 screens in India. On Sunday, a few theatres in Mumbai ran as high as 25 shows a day for Jawan.
However, the major part of collections of the film are coming from north Indian states and the Hindi speaking audience. The Tamil audience has criticised the film because for them, it offers no novelty given that it’s a mixture of 40 odd Tamil films including Atlee’s own Bigil and Mersal.
Some of the sequences in the film are exact copy paste, it even makes ostensible reference to Hollywood classics like John Wick and also the Netflix series Money Heist in certain places.
With Gadar 2 almost reaching the end of its theatrical run, Jawan is expected to have a solo control over theatres across India and set the cash registers ringing further.
