Indian 2 box office collections: Kamal Haasan, Shankar film has an underwhelming first day in India

The first-day numbers of Indian 2 are the second highest ever for both Kamal Hassan, trailing behind Vikram (Rs. 34.50 crore) and director Shankar, behind 2.0 (Rs. 70 crore).

By Jatinder Singh

Updated on Jul 13, 2024 | 02:57 PM IST | 223.7K

Kamal Haasan in Indian 2 (image courtesy of Lyca Studios)

Indian 2 limped onto screens with an ordinary opening at the Indian box office, scraping together just over Rs. 31 crore on its first day. While this marks the highest opening day for a Tamil film in 2023, that's not saying much considering hardly anything worthwhile has been released this year so far. Considering the high costs and the franchise value, the film needed to score over Rs. 40 crore and close to Rs. 50 crore day, which it fell well short of.

For the cast, first-day numbers are the second highest ever for both Kamal Hassan, trailing behind Vikram (Rs. 34.50 crore) and director Shankar, behind 2.0 (Rs. 70 crore). It is just 10 per cent higher than the 2015 release I, despite the ticket prices having more than doubled since then.

More than the underwhelming start, the bigger issue for the film is the poor audience reception. Films can often overcome their weak start if the audience reception is positive but the negative reception has pretty much sealed the fate of Indian 2.

Breaking down the film’s performance, it grossed Rs. 13 crore approx in the home state of Tamil Nadu versus Rs. 22 crore for Vikram. Almost half of this amount came from the two cities of Chennai and Coimbatore, where big-ticket films usually see 30-40 per cent of their first-day revenue. This does not indicate strong performance in these cities, as the numbers should have been higher, but rather highlights the very poor performance outside the major centres in the state.

Telugu states grossed Rs. 10.25 crore, which is seen as better relative to Tamil Nadu and probably is. However, Shankar is a big draw in Telugu states, his film I opened to nearly Rs. 9 crore in 2015 which adjusted for inflation is Rs. 20 crore today. Elsewhere, Karnataka and Kerala had a poor showing, with the latter actually being less than nearly a decade old I. The Hindi dubbed version was a washout but that is fine because there were no expectations for it anyway.