Sticking to the pre-Diwali tradition, all of last week's Bollywood releases failed at the ticket windows

With Diwali coming up and inflation refusing to go down, the general public seems cautious as ever. And this behaviour is reflecting on the box office collection as well. Besides, among the new releases, none of them starred an A-lister reason ample enough to stay away from cinema halls.

Over the weekend, Mickey Virus saw average collections

Interestingly, the past Friday saw seven releases but none of them proved to be exceptional. However, Mickey Virus turned out to be the strongest among the poor lot. According to the trade, the film starring Manish Paul and Elli Avram bagged Rs 4.36 crore over the weekend. Trade analyst Taran Adarsh pegged the collection at Rs 4.75 though with a Friday-Saturday-Sunday collection breakdown amounting to Rs 1.35 crore, Rs 1.6 crore and Rs 1.8 crore respectively.

Amod Mehra, trade expert, simply dismissed the week as disastrous. `Although Mickey Virus made an average haul, one can't discount the fact that the film opened at 1200 screens. All the movies, be it Ishk Actually, Wake Up India or Sooper Se Ooper, failed miserably.`


To make matters worse, even the Akshay Kumar-starrer BOSS couldn't capitalise on the dismal state of the smaller films. `Its net collection comes close to Rs 50 crore, which is just not enough for a film that released on a Wednesday and starred a big name. It's been a negligible week for Bollywood films,` adds Rajesh Thadani, a city-based exhibitor.

On the Hollywood front, Gravity and Captain Phillips are still creating buzz thanks to word of mouth. As per the trade, last week's The Fifth Estate did far worse than expected. Much opposed to the present gloom, the film industry is looking forward to the Hrithik Roshan-starrer Krrish 3. The superhero film, which was two years in the making, is a solo Bollywood release on the upcoming Friday.