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Sushant Singh Rajput's Chhichhore gets a release date in China; Great news for Aamir Khan's Laal Singh Chaddha
Sushant Singh Rajput's 2019 release Chhichhore, which had won National Film Awards early this year, will now be releasing China in January next year.
Earlier on Tuesday, Dangal fame Nitesh Tiwari’s Chhichhore fronted by Sushant Singh Rajput and Shraddha Kapoor landed the China release date. The film will be released on 7th January 2022 in the Middle Kingdom, making it the first Indian film since 2019 to release in the world's biggest box office market.
The film was initially supposed to release in the first quarter of 2020 but cinemas shutdown due to COVID in January 2020 meant the film was pushed ahead. When cinemas reopened in July 2020, India-China border conflict were fuming, and there was an unofficial ban on cultural exchange. Now with things cooling down again, the film has secured the date.
Speaking of Chhichhore's prospects in China, the reception to the film in Chinese socials is just “good”, with 7.2/10 score on local IMDb equivalent Douban as compared to 9.0/10 of Dangal on the same. A great presage for the China box office is the Taiwan box office. The film was released in Taiwan in November 2019, opening to a quite good $110K on 51 cinemas but couldn’t manage to hold, dropping 60%+ every week, closing at $380K in the full run, well short of Dangal's $5.5M. Generally, one can expect a film to do 35-50x of Taiwan in China, that would suggest gross in teens for the film in China, but there are always exceptions, the most popular one being Secret Superstar, which did almost 130x of its Taiwan numbers in China. The film can still break out and spring a surprise if it strikes a chord with the audience but availability of HD versions for streaming won't make things easy.
There may not be much commercial value to the news, but it has a much larger symbolic one. One, when Hollywood films are struggling to get approval for dates in China, an Indian (and Korean) film getting the date may have big geopolitical implications. Two, it's great news for other Indian films, most importantly Aamir Khan's Laal Singh Chaddha, which is expected to do wonders in China considering how beloved Forrest Gump is in the country & Aamir Khan is a huge star there. We will keep you updated on that, stay tuned.
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