From Kismet to Dhurandhar and Ramayana: How Bollywood box office grew from ₹1 crore lifetime hauls to ₹100 crore in a day
Here's the latest box office buzz making the rounds:
When Dhurandhar The Revenge did a hat-trick of ₹ 100-crore rupees days at the Indian ticket-window earlier this year, it was seen as an oddity, an anomaly. Trade pundits argued that the combination of high ticket prices and hype would be hard to emulate. Ramayana proved them wrong in just eight months. On its first Monday, the Nitesh Tiwari movie minted ₹ 107.50 crore rupees in India.
Adding to this, Dhurandhar and Ramayana have rewritten box-office collection rules for Bollywood. The two films have set and solidified this new standard for what a Hindi movie can and should make at the domestic ticket-window to be a red-letter day. It is remarkable that just over a decade ago, this figure was considered good enough for a movie’s lifetime run. But the evolution of Hindi cinema’s box-office fortunes has always been that rapid. This evolution has seen the industry's blockbusters grow from earning ₹ 1 crore rupees in their lifetime to ₹ 100 crore rupees in a day.
Meanwhile, Box-office tabulation wasn’t always systematic in Indian cinema. In the pre-independence era, footfalls were counted. Sometimes, films’ runs were measured by how long they ran in theatres. Dadasaheb Phalke’s Lanka Dehen, considered the first ‘hit’, ran for 23 weeks upon rollout in 1917. But it wasn’t until 1940 that independent bodies and movie journalists began to calculate films’ earnings.
Notably, Three years later, Kismet emerged as Hindi cinema’s first smash hit. The Gyan Mukherjee movie, starring Ashok Kumar, rode the nationalistic wave and the thriller genre's appeal to mint ₹ 1 crore rupees. It is estimated the movie sold 3.75 crore rupees tickets in India at the time (the same as Dhurandhar 1). Kismet held the record for five years until the Tamil movie Chandralekha minted ₹ 1.55 crore rupees in 1948, snatching the crown. But it laid the foundation for ‘crore rupees’ to be used as a common term for Indian cinema’s box-office earnings.
As per the latest buzz, For the longest time, Indian films’ box-office earnings were measured solely by their domestic box-office takings. That is because most Indian films did not have a wide rollout overseas. There were exceptions. Awara and Sangam were hits in Russia, while Caravan had a great run in China. But the measure of a movie’s success remained what it did in India. By that metric, Mithun Chakraborty ’s Disco Dancer was a moderate success. It collected ₹ 6 crore rupees in India upon rollout in 1985. Two years later, it rolled out in Russia and became a cultural phenomenon. It remains one of the most-watched films in Russia even four decades later. After its rollout in Russia, Disco Dancer’s worldwide earnings grew to ₹ 100 crore rupees. In the 90s, Indian films began to rollout overseas as the diaspora opened new markets for Bollywood. Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge rode on this overseas wave to cross ₹ 100 crore rupees worldwide. But no Indian movie reached the mark at the Indian ticket-window for years.
In further updates, From the 1950s to the 80s, Indian films almost always had staggered releases. Prints existed as large spools of reels. Transporting them across the country took time and effort. That is why most Indian films were rolled out in some markets on one date and in others weeks or even months later. For instance, Amitabh Bachchan’s debut movie Saat Hindustani rolled out in Delhi in 1969 and in Bombay only two years later. This meant that the concept of an ‘opening day or weekend’ was absent. Films grew by word of mouth only.
On top of that, That changed in the 90s as the distribution network grew, allowing filmmakers to rollout films almost simultaneously nationwide. The first movie to utilise this was Mukul Anand’s Trimurti. The action entertainer starred Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, and Shah Rukh Khan. It came out two months after DDLJ, which had made Shah Rukh a big star. Anil and Jackie were already established names. The hype made Trimurti the biggest opener in Bollywood history. The movie minted ₹ 1.06 crore rupees on its first day. This feat made ₹ 1 crore rupees an aspirational opening figure for Bollywood, a trend that persisted till multiplexes arrived a few years later.
It was the multiplex era that guaranteed wide national releases as theatre chains allowed distributors to lock screens nationwide. This also led to an increase in ticket prices. According to Ticket-window India, the average ticket price in India increased from ₹ 25 in 2001 to ₹ 70 in 2008. This led to a boom in box-office earnings, too. And in 2008, a Hindi movie finally collected ₹ 100 crore rupees net domestically. It was Aamir Khan ’s Ghajini that created the 100-crore rupees club. Since then, over 150 films have joined the ranks from across languages and industries. This also created a new benchmark for measuring an Indian movie’s success. It had to be a ‘100-crore rupees hit ’.
Source: Hindustan Times