Ticket sales for Tolly puja releases leave Bollywood films behind in state
Times of India | 15 October 2024
Kolkata: This puja, Bengal’s entertainment sector achieved unprecedented success and garnered the highest revenues in 2024. Tollywood’s box office collections for the three films – ‘Bohurupi’, ‘Tekka’ and ‘Shastri’ — have surpassed those of two big-ticket Bollywood puja releases — ‘Jigra’ and ‘Vicky Vidya ka Woh Wala Video’.
The pre-puja box-office performance of Tollywood films has been lacklustre.
Those who attributed the RG Kar agitation as a plausible reason for the unimpressive footfall for Srijit Mukherji’s ‘Padatik’ and Raj Chakraborty’s ‘Babli’ failed to elucidate why Rajkummar Rao and Shraddha Kapoor’s ‘Stree 2’ set cash registers ringing in Bengal during the same time. The pujas turned the tables.
“The two Bollywood releases have been disasters at the box office. At Navina, their collections have been trounced decisively by Srijit Mukherji’s ‘Tekka’ and Nandita Roy and Shiboprosad Mukherjee’s ‘Bohurupi’. It is not the star or the director that determines whether a film will be viewed. Movie-goers will allocate two hours to a film if it provides value for their time and money,” said Navin Chowkhani of Navina.
Shiboprosad Mukherjee is ecstatic that ‘Bohurupi’ has been watched by 3,11,000 people within six days of its release. “Some of the prominent figures from Bollywood have told me this is the quintessential Bengali movie they can proudly showcase to the rest of India. Single-screen theatres like Star, Minar and Menoka recorded consecutive houseful shows,” Mukherjee said.
Dev is thrilled with the response to ‘Tekka’. “In four days, ‘Tekka’ had over 450 houseful shows. Over the years, this is the highest grosser of Dev Entertainment during the pujas,” he said.
According to Srijit Mukherji, there was an air of pessimism even before the RG Kar incident. “Bengali films were not doing well at all. ‘Ajogyo’ was the only film that crossed Rs 1 crore at the national plex collection. After the RG Kar incident, the entire mood of the city plummeted. ‘Tekka’ had a lot of things going against it but it still got an enormous response in six days,” Mukherji said.