It was a disastrous opening weekend for Anurag Kashyap’s GANGS OF WASSEYPUR and yet another blow to a section of English film reviewers who have been going out of their way to selectively promote certain filmmakers and their films. The film has fared even worse in the Hindi heartland and if the filmmakers hoped that the story of a Muslim goon would help them win brownie points at the box office, that has not happened. But for the metros and big cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata the film’s collection won’t even have crossed the 1 crore mark on Friday.
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It seems that the public knows it all including the reality behind such glowing reviews. ‘Yeh public hai pyare, sab jaanti hai.’ If the avant-garde filmmaker hoped to cash in on ‘keh ke loonga’ theme song, the average cine buffs have refused to be taken in by the brouhaha created around the film and rejected it resoundingly. There is no positive word-of-mouth for the film except its paid publicity on Page 3 and the film-review pages of metro-centric English newspapers.
The collections of GOW, released on almost 1000 screens across India, were poor on Friday (2.75 cr. approx.) and rose marginally on Saturday (3.2 cr. approx.) and Sunday (3.75 cr. approx.). According to reliable sources, in Kanpur, an important center in UP, the collections were almost 10% below the Friday levels. The reports from Bihar and Jharkhand are most disappointing. The film collected around a piddling Rs.5-6 lakhs on Friday with almost no growth on Saturday and Sunday.
It will be interesting to know the reaction of the filmmakers to this box office debacle and what will they do now with GANGS OF WASSEYPUR Part 2, to be released in a month’s time.
(Rajesh Kumar Singh is Editorial Consultant for Festivals and Markets for BollywoodTrade.com. He is a filmmaker, critic and market analyst)
