On Friday we flagged a detail buried in The Vvaan‘s advance booking coverage: an Avengers: Endgame re-release was selling comparable numbers of tickets in national multiplex chains to a brand new Hindi film with two bankable leads.
The weekend numbers are now in and the detail turned out to be the story.
What Both Films Did
Per India TV, reporting Saturday’s figures:
- The Vvaan: Friday ₹8 crore, Saturday ₹9.59 crore, two-day total ₹17.59 crore
- Avengers: Endgame Encore: Friday ₹7.25 crore, Saturday ₹5.92 crore, two-day total ₹13.17 crore
A seven-year-old Hollywood film, in re-release, with no new footage, opened ₹0.75 crore behind a fresh Hindi star vehicle and finished the first two days within ₹4.5 crore of it.
As with everything else this week, the figures are contested. India.com has The Vvaan‘s Saturday at ₹11 crore and its two-day India net at ₹19 crore, a jump it puts at 37.5 percent, with a global two-day total of ₹24.85 crore including ₹2.25 crore overseas. ETV Bharat described the two-day figure as “over ₹16 crore”. Three outlets, three numbers, one weekend.
The Sunday Picture
Per Koimoi, The Vvaan‘s Sunday advance booking reached 1.76 lakh tickets for a gross of ₹4.01 crore, with 18 shows sold out before the day began.
That is a genuinely healthy advance for a third day and it points to a strong Sunday. On a reported budget of around ₹50 crore, a first weekend in the high twenties or low thirties puts the film in recoverable territory rather than trouble, and the direction of travel has been up since Friday.
Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia did not open the film. Word of mouth did the rest, which is the outcome Pinkvilla predicted and the one we said to watch for.
Now The Uncomfortable Part
A re-release is the cheapest product in the exhibition business. There is no new shoot, no new marketing spend of any consequence, no talent costs, no fresh P&A campaign. The print exists. The rights exist. You put it back on the screen.
And it did ₹13.17 crore in two days in India.
Set that against the economics of the film sitting next to it. The Vvaan cost a reported ₹50 crore to make, before marketing. It out-earned the re-release by a few crore over two days.
You do not need a spreadsheet to see what that comparison does to a distributor’s thinking.
What It Says About Supply
Re-releases stopped being a novelty in India about three years ago and have now become a structural part of the calendar. The standard explanation is nostalgia, which is comfortable and mostly wrong.
The better explanation is supply. The multiplex audience in India has a fairly fixed appetite for a night out and a fairly specific set of expectations about what a big-screen film should deliver: scale, spectacle, an event. When new Hindi releases fail to deliver that in sufficient volume, the audience does not stop going to the cinema. It goes to whatever is delivering it, and a film engineered in 2019 to be the largest possible communal cinema experience delivers it reliably.
Endgame is not beating new Hindi films because people are sentimental. It is beating them because it is still, on the specific metric of big-screen event value, a better product than most of what is being made now.
That is not a comfortable sentence and the Hindi trade has been careful not to write it.
The Thing That Should Worry Exhibition
Re-releases are excellent for cinema owners in the short term. High margin, no risk, guaranteed footfall on a dead weekend.
They are terrible for the ecosystem in the medium term. Every screen given to a re-release is a screen not building an audience for something new. Every distributor who watches a seven-year-old film out-earn a ₹50 crore production learns a lesson about where to put money. And a market that runs on its own back catalogue is a market that has stopped growing.
The Indian exhibition sector spent the post-pandemic years complaining about a content shortage. Re-releases are what a content shortage looks like once the complaining stops and the programming department gets on with it.
Bengaluru Baath Take
The Vvaan is doing fine. Up on Friday, up again into Sunday, a healthy advance, and a cast that has been rewarded for a film that opened on nothing and grew on word of mouth. That is the honest way to build a weekend and it deserves noting.
The Endgame number is the one that should be on a whiteboard in every Hindi production office on Monday morning. ₹13.17 crore in two days, for a film with no marketing budget, no stars doing press, no trailer launch at a railway station, and no possibility of a surprise.
Somebody in the Hindi industry needs to stop calling that nostalgia and start calling it competition.
Sources
- India TV, Saturday figures for The Vvaan, The Paradise and Avengers Endgame Encore
- India.com, conflicting day 2 and worldwide figures for The Vvaan
- ETV Bharat, day 2 coverage
- Koimoi, Sunday advance booking figures
- NewsBytes, Endgame re-release advance context
