Ramayana opens tomorrow with about ₹111.89 crore of tickets already sold in India, which PVR INOX says is the biggest pre-Diwali advance in its thirty-year history. Two national outlets are reporting that the Kannada version is underperforming despite Yash. We think they have read the wrong column.
The numbers, as of this evening
Sacnilk’s tracker at 8 pm on 4 November: ₹111.89 crore gross across all show dates, ₹90 crore excluding blocked seats, 30.32 lakh tickets, 95,055 shows, 203 houseful shows. The last twenty-four hours alone added ₹29.62 crore.
Opening day on its own is ₹42.69 crore gross from 11.54 lakh tickets across 25,640 shows, at twenty percent occupancy.
Bollywood Hungama, counting the national chains itself rather than relaying Sacnilk, has about 3.3 lakh tickets sold across the top three circuits with roughly ₹30 crore of Hindi advance, and projects a ₹60 crore opening day. Its own piece also says the Hindi advance “more or less locks in an opening of Rs. 50 crore”, so even within one article the projection moves by ten crore.
And the exhibitors are on the record, which is rare and useful. Kamal Gianchandani of PVR INOX, on 3 November: “With Rs. 25 crore+ in advance ticket sales and two more days to go, Namit Malhotra’s Ramayana has shattered the long-believed pre-Diwali jinx at the Indian box office! It is now on course to record the BIGGEST pre-Diwali advance bookings in PVRINOX’s 30+ year long history!” A day earlier he said the circuit expected to “cross the 1 million ticket mark by Wednesday night”.
Devang Sampat of Cinepolis India, which is marking its 500th screen in India with this release, said the film is “poised to set a new benchmark for pre-Diwali week collections”. Ashish Saksena of BookMyShow singled out “the uptake across premium formats, particularly IMAX and 3D”.
Here is the column everyone is quoting
State by advance value: Maharashtra ₹20.96 crore, Delhi ₹16.17 crore, Karnataka ₹15.00 crore, Telangana ₹8.53 crore, Gujarat ₹8.14 crore.
Language: Hindi ₹90.29 crore and eighty-one percent, Telugu ₹9.65 crore and nine percent, Kannada ₹8.70 crore and eight percent, Tamil two percent, Malayalam one percent.
On that reading, Kannada trails Telugu, which is what ETV Bharat flags, and Bollywood Hungama puts it more bluntly: “The sales are not so good for the South Versions, despite the presence of Yash.”
And here is the column they are not quoting
Occupancy. Karnataka is running at twenty-two percent on its advance, the third highest among the ten biggest states, behind only Tamil Nadu at twenty-seven and Telangana at twenty-six.
Maharashtra is at eleven percent.
So Karnataka is filling twice the proportion of its seats that Maharashtra is. It sits third by rupees because Maharashtra and Delhi have far more screens, more premium pricing and the Hindi version in all of them. Karnataka is not lagging. It is sold out harder than the two states above it.
Now the Kannada share, which is the bit that actually got misread. Go back through the week. On 31 October Karnataka was the top state in the country at ₹3.89 crore and Kannada was thirteen percent of all bookings. On 1 November Karnataka was still top, at ₹3.96 crore, and Bengaluru was the top city in India. Koimoi’s headline: “Karnataka takes the crown.”
Between then and now, Kannada bookings more than doubled in absolute terms, from ₹2.56 crore to ₹8.70 crore. The percentage fell from thirteen to eight because Hindi went from ₹16.28 crore to ₹90.29 crore in the same window. North India books late. The south books early.
Kannada did not weaken. The denominator grew. Reporting a falling share as softness, when the underlying number nearly tripled, is a basic error and two outlets have made it.
What is genuinely worth watching
IMAX. ₹13.57 crore from only 755 shows at fifty-three percent occupancy, against 44,628 ordinary 3D shows at far lower fill. Premium formats are sixteen percent of the advance off 1,623 shows. That is the most efficient real estate in Indian exhibition and it is why Godzilla Minus Zero has been pushed from 6 November to 20 November in India, reportedly because Ramayana holds a two-week IMAX exclusivity. That exclusivity term rests on a single unnamed trade source, so treat it as reported.
Who is selling it here. Yash’s own Monster Mind Creations is the Karnataka distributor. He is both the draw and the beneficiary, which is a model more Kannada stars should look at.
And the previews. North American paid previews on 4 November are solidly reported at over USD 1.20 million. Indian paid previews on 4 November are not: Sacnilk’s own tracker shows a 4 November premiere row at zero rupees, zero tickets, one show. Anyone telling you India had paid previews today is ahead of the evidence.
Bengaluru Baath Take
The honest summary is that this is an enormous advance and nobody knows what the film is worth yet. ₹111.89 crore of pre-sales is a statement about marketing, scale and a two-year publicity campaign. It is not a statement about the film, and the first reactions out of the Los Angeles premiere were mixed: praise for Yash’s Ravana and the scale, complaints that the narration was “serial like” and the emotion thin.
The forecasts in circulation range from ₹50 crore to ₹100 crore for day one depending on who is talking and whether they mean Hindi net or all-language gross. ETV Bharat says ₹200 crore worldwide on day one “currently appears challenging”. We will report what happened, with the tracker named and the day numbered, rather than picking a forecast to be right about.
What we will say now is this. For the second time in a fortnight, the interesting Karnataka story was in a column nobody was reading. Twenty-two percent occupancy against Maharashtra’s eleven. Bengaluru top city in the country on 1 November. Kannada bookings tripling while its percentage fell.
This state keeps getting written up as a secondary market by people looking at the wrong number.
Sources
- Sacnilk: Ramayana Part 1 advance booking tracker
- Bollywood Hungama: national chain ticket count and opening projection
- Bollywood Hungama: Kamal Gianchandani on the PVR INOX record
- Pinkvilla: on-record exhibitor comment
- ETV Bharat: day one prediction and language split
- The Week: 31 October advance snapshot
- Koimoi: Karnataka takes the crown
- Gulf News: worldwide pre-sales and North American previews
