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No amount of support from a good section of media as well as industry insiders could save Shanghai from seeing a premature end to its run at the ticket windows. The collections of this Dibakar Banerjee film did hold on to some extent over the weekdays but by no means were the numbers good enough to convince everyone from believing that here was a hit in the making. Resultantly, with around Rs. 18 crore coming in at the end of the first week, the film has turned out to be a barely coverage affair commercially.
Of course once the weekend collections started trickling in, the makers did come out full throttle and explained the cost v/s recovery. That was a fair decision on their part because without this, the perception about the film’s acceptability would have gone further down. This doesn’t mean that suddenly there was a newfound interest amongst the audience for this film. In fact if that had to happen, the turnaround would have been much quicker, given the fact there was hardly any competition at multiplexes.
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For Emraan Hashmi though it was important that the film at least manages to cover costs so that he can continue his box office run without any hindrance. To his credit, since the film is offbeat when compared to the kind of work he does, it didn’t harm him commercially. In fact if Jannat 2 would have seen audience response like the way it has been for Shanghai, it would have acted as a severe blow to his plans. However with an experimental affair like Shanghai that did rely on his name commercially but didn’t quite centre on him thematically, Emraan has only managed one step ahead due to good critical acclaim.
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While the film is on its way out, even Rs. 25 crore looking highly improbable. Though the collections are still much better than each of Dibakar’s first three films (Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Love Sex aur Dhokha), one still expected better considering the hype surrounding it and the scale at which it was pitched.
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