PATHAAN WON’T CROSS BAAHUBALI’S COLLECTIONS BUT THE PURPOSE IS SERVED
Pathaan, starring Shah Rukh Khan, was released on January 25 and as discussed in our last week’s edition, it took an earth-shattering opening. It became the first film to collect as much as Rs. 68 crores in a single day. Even after the five-day extended weekend, it continued to do well.
A lot of experts expected Pathaan to drop in the second weekend. However, it didn’t and collected Rs. 22.25 crores and Rs. 27.50 crores on its second Saturday and Sunday respectively. This is a huge feat for a film that has already collected a lot.
On Saturday, February 4, it crossed Dangal‘s collections and emerged as the biggest Hindi film of all time. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, February 8, it crossed KGF – Chapter 2‘s lifetime earnings.
In two weeks, Pathaan is expected to collect Rs. 438 crores. The next target is to beat Baahubali 2‘s collections of Rs. 510 crores. This means that Pathaan will have to earn Rs. 72 crores from the third week to achieve this target. This seems a bit impossible as it earned around Rs. 90 crores in the second week against Rs. 347.75 crores in Week 1. Hence, as one can see, the collections will fall further in the forthcoming weeks. Also till now, it had no competition but next Friday, it’ll compete with big films like Shehzada and Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania. At the most, Pathaan can earn Rs. 60 crores more and barely cross the Rs. 500 crore mark. Going past Baahubali 2’s collections seems out of the question.
But post-pandemic, one can never be sure. When films work, they work like crazy as seen by the performance of films like Kantara, Drishyam 2 etc. For instance, no one expected Drishyam 2 to collect Rs. 232 crores when it had completed two weeks. After collecting Rs. 159 crores in 15 days, it earned around Rs. 72 crores from Week 3 onwards and that was also unexpected. Hence, a clearer idea of the lifetime earnings of Pathaan will emerge after how it fares in its third weekend.
Nevertheless, the purpose is served. Pathaan’s mega-blockbuster success brought respite to the industry and made it clear that Bollywood has bounced back with a bang.