Last Friday's Bollywood releases, Pappu Can't Dance Saala and Jo Hum Chahein both had poor luck at the box office. While the former, starring Neha Dhupia and Vinay Pathak, failed to make any waves, Jo Hum...featuring newcomers, didn't find any takers either.
However, not surprisingly, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, raced ahead, raking about R11 crore from India box office in the first three days.
Stating that there were no expectations from the debutant jodi, Sameer Gill-Simran Mundi love story helmed by first-timer Aman Gill, trade analyst Amod Mehra points out that the Tom Cruise spy thriller delivered as expected. "Mission Impossible is a big brand.
And it has taken full advantage of no other major release along with it, " he says, adding that the fourth installment of the MI series won't be affected by Farhan Akhtar's Don 2: The Chase Continues, which opens in cinemas this Friday.
"Don 2 will do its own business, " he maintains, enthusing that since the Hollywood film has done well, the distributors won't reduce the number of screens or shows because of Don 2. Indore based distributor Aditya Choksi and Manoj Desai, executive director of G7 Cineplex and Maratha Mandir theatre, Mumbai, also attribute the opening of MI4 to the brand and action.
According to Desai, "People are enjoying the action and the Burj Khalifa sequence had them at the end of their seats."
While Choksi observes, "The film has done over R 35 lakh in Central India and that's a handsome amount of business for an English film, " pegging the Tom Cruise film at par with Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - II.
Meanwhile, Milan Luthria's The Dirty Picture continues to do wonderful business. "Till Thursday, the film had netted R 71 crore from the theatres in India and by Sunday it had crossed R 75 crore, And that's a huge amount for a heroine-centric film, " he concludes.
