As was predicted in this column last week, it was Alone that led the show at the box office. The horrex affair had a target audience in mind and in that aspect, the Bhushan Patel film pretty much scored in the territories and the centers where it was expected to do well. As a result, the film collected well at single screens, especially in the interiors. Though multiplexes stayed low during the weekend, the film held on well on the power of gentry audience, as a result of which around 14 crore came in.
These are better collections than Bipasha Basu’s last couple of supernatural films – Creature and Aatma. In fact for a woman-centric film, Bipasha has managed to showcase yet again that she is creating her own charter. The film has basically a week to score well since Baby and Dolly Ki Doli arrive next (with chances of Messenger of God coming in as well), which means count of shows would be curtailed in the second week.
Dubbed film I had a low start, though it was still better than many other Tamil and Telugu films that arrive in Hindi at a pan-India level. The word of mouth is average to good for the film and at around 7 crore weekend, it has crossed the lifetime business of Vikram’s Hindi release David. In fact the film is going in the same direction as Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroop which had similar collections and while 10 crore would be crossed, it would be interesting to see how far does it go from here.
As expected though, both Sharafat Gayi Tel Lene as well as Crazy Cukkad Family were washouts on Day One itself, though the Zayed Khan starrer did fetch better reviews than expected. Much more planned promotion, marketing and release could have helped its cause.
Joginder Tuteja tweets @tutejajoginder
