The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest finished day eight on ₹57 crore net in India, and the line going around is that this makes it Sidharth Malhotra’s biggest hit. It does not. Four of his own films have done more. One of them did almost twice as much.
Start with the numbers, because they are good numbers and they deserve to be reported accurately rather than inflated. The Week has day eight at ₹3.40 crore net from 2,144 shows, taking the India net to ₹57 crore and India gross to ₹67.74 crore. Overseas gross stands at ₹6 crore. Worldwide gross is ₹73.74 crore. The opening week closed at ₹53.60 crore net. The film released on 25 September.
Now the claim, against the same paper’s own table
Here is Sidharth Malhotra’s India net on his biggest films, as The Week itself lists them in the same piece that calls The Vvaan his biggest hit so far:
- Ek Villain: ₹105.76 crore
- Brothers: ₹82.49 crore
- Kapoor & Sons: ₹73.22 crore
- Student Of The Year: ₹70 crore
- The Vvaan, eight days: ₹57 crore
- Marjaavaan: ₹48.04 crore
- Yodha: ₹33.48 crore
Fifth, on the same measure, in the same article. The honest version of the sentence is that The Vvaan has already passed the lifetime figures of Marjaavaan and Yodha in eight days, which is a real achievement and is exactly what the copy inside the piece says. The headline does something else.
How does the claim get made? By switching units mid-comparison. ₹73.74 crore worldwide gross is a bigger number than ₹70 crore India net, so if you put those two side by side, Student Of The Year loses. They are not the same measure. Gross includes the ticket tax that never reaches the film. Worldwide includes territories the older films barely released in. Comparing this film’s worldwide gross to an older film’s India net is the box office equivalent of comparing your salary to someone else’s take-home and declaring yourself richer.
And the figures still do not agree with each other
We have been keeping a count of how far apart trade sources land on the same film on the same day, and The Vvaan has been one of the worst offenders of the fortnight. On day six, IWMBuzz had it crossing ₹49 crore net. Pinkvilla, the same day, had it at ₹45 crore in six days. That is a ₹4 crore gap on a film that had made under fifty, which is roughly nine percent of the total.
The opening weekend has the same problem. The Hollywood Reporter India put it at ₹33.25 crore net. The Week’s day-two figure, which we wrote about last week, was already being reported three different ways. None of these outlets is making anything up. They are each using a different data vendor, and nobody states which one, so the reader is left to pick a favourite.
What day eight actually tells you
The genuinely interesting number in The Week’s report is not the crore figure. It is 2,144 shows.
A film that opened wide and held through its first week is down to just over two thousand shows on its second Friday, because Drishyam: The Conclusion opened on 2 October and took the screens. That is the exhibition business working exactly as designed and exactly as brutally as always. The Vvaan did not stop selling tickets. It stopped being given places to sell them.
Which is why the ₹3.40 crore on day eight is a better signal than it looks. On a third of the showcount, against the biggest Hindi opening of the year, a folk horror film with no franchise behind it still found three and a half crore. The audience is there. The real estate is not.
Bengaluru Baath Take
The Vvaan is a win and it does not need the inflation. A standalone folk horror with a star who has had an uneven decade, opening at ₹11 crore and reaching ₹57 crore net in eight days, is a genuinely good outcome and a vote for mid-budget original material at a time when the industry has convinced itself only franchises work.
But the industry cannot stop upgrading its own wins. “Biggest hit so far” is a claim that fails against a table printed in the same article, and it fails for a boring reason: somebody compared gross to net because gross was the bigger number. Readers notice this eventually, and what they take from it is not that The Vvaan did well. It is that box office reporting is marketing with a decimal point.
Two asks, neither of them difficult. State net or gross every single time. Name the data source. The trade does both of these in private conversation without blinking, and refuses to do either in print.
