Mardaani Does Average Business In Its Opening Weekend At The Box Office

As predicted in this column last week, Mardaani took an opening around the 30% mark on the opening day. This was pretty much on the expected lines since the promos had pretty much established that this wasn’t a quintessential Bollywood entertainer in the offering. It was expected to work well with the niche audience and that too if the word of mouth was good enough.

As it turned out eventually, those who saw the film liked it and though there wasn’t exceptional appreciation that came its way, no one pulled it down either, hence resulting in decent collections over the weekend. With over 14.5 crores* coming in, the film has managed some footfalls at least to help spread the word. Now it all depends on how sustained do the collections remain from this point on since Raja Natwarlal arrives soon after, which is a massy enough film that would completely dominate the single screens at the least.

Having said that, one has to give it to Mardaani to make an impression when it was expected that Singham Returns would end up dominating over it in a big way. Still, that didn’t quite turn out to be the case, which is a small win in itself for the Rani Mukerji starrer. However, all eyes are on how far does Mardaani go from here. For director Pradeep Sarkar, a personal target is for the film to surpass the first week collections (17 crore) of his last release Lafangey Parindey (which had released exactly four years back on the same weekend i.e. 20th August 2010), something which should be possible.

Other releases of the week couldn’t even find good screens coming their way with even ‘Mad About Dance‘, which saw promotion from Shah Rukh Khan, not covering much of a distance.

Joginder Tuteja tweets @tutejajoginder

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