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Opinion: Akshay Kumar’s Welcome To The Jungle revives faith with an UNADULTERATED, ORGANIC, & AUTHENTIC box office run
Here’s how Akshay Kumar’s Welcome To The Jungle's success is special. The Ahmed Khan directorial is somehow bringing sanity back to the box office.
Welcome To The Jungle has been performing well at the box office, with Rs. 81 crore nett coming in just 5 days, including previews. The film started fairly in paid previews, had a good first day, and then started coming on its own on Saturday and Sunday with day-on-day growth. While all of this is good, what’s special is the fact that the Welcome To The Jungle makers have completely sworn off any sort of gimmicks, force-feeding, or inflation all this while.
This could well be seen in the advance booking stage itself when there wasn’t any sudden splurge seen in ticket sales at some particular hours. Even though the sales were far from being optimal and there was risk involved around how the film would behave during the weekend, the makers chose to let spot booking do the talking instead of jacking up the advance sales.
The trend continued well over the weekend as well, when the film did good business without opting for any self-buying tactics. This could well have been an easy way out, at least on Friday when the film needed to be established. After all, this is an expensive film, and hence a jumpstart was required. However, again, the makers chose to have audiences as their biggest marketing tool, and they were the ones who spread word of mouth, the results of which were there to be seen in Saturday and Sunday growth.
There is no grey area around this anymore; this is a complete legit practice now. There are corporate tie-ups, and then there are also bulk bookings done in conjunction with theater chains. For the unversed, the makers usually let a chunk of the audience sample the film in bulk, and then their word of mouth drives further action at the box office. No such thing happened with Welcome To The Jungle.
Now that’s one practice which is really crying to be discontinued because it’s completely destroying the ecosystem of theatrical economics. If the audiences start getting tickets at half the price on the very first day, then the message is loud and clear that there is something wrong with the film, or even if that’s not the case, then the makers are just not confident about their product. In case of Welcome To The Jungle, they were all quite confident despite the usual bout of pre-release negativity.
Many times, makers manufacture numbers to make them look better and market a higher weekend collection on social media. Not that this stays right till the closing of the film's theatrical run. Eventually, ‘adjustments’ are made in the final tally with the right checks and balances.
However, there is a lot of sentiment and credibility attached to the first day and first weekend numbers, due to which inflated collections by even 15-20 per cent are the order of the day. In the case of Welcome To The Jungle, it was, in fact, the other way round. Despite trade numbers being higher at a few places and estimates being bigger, the actual official collections are lower. The rarest of rare phenomena indeed.
Before Welcome To The Jungle, it was Bhooth Bangla, another Akshay Kumar film, which also took an organic route and let the audience decide the fate of the film. May this bring a positive change to the way makers announce box office numbers. It only works for the entire ecosystem and brings some sanity back to the business.
Stay tuned to Pinkvilla for more updates.
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