‘Kesari’ has taken a very good start at the Box Office. It is also quite special for Akshay Kumar because with the film, he has now registered the second best start ever in his career. The biggest so far is ‘Gold’ which had accumulated Rs. 25.25 crore. It had seen an Independence Day release which was a huge advantage. That said, it had seen ‘Satyameva Jayate’ as a major competition and that had evened out the advantage to a good extent.
Now ‘Kesari’ has arrived solo and though it does have some kind of advantage due to partial holiday of Holi, it practically saw a later afternoon start for itself since majority of theatres across the country were closed during morning and early afternoon due to festivities. Hence, the start of Rs. 21.50 crore that the film has taken is still quite good as from here on it would all about seeing further growth on Saturday and Sunday.
Before ‘Kesari’ and ‘Gold’, Akshay Kumar has seen two of his films go past the Rs. 20 crore mark, ‘2.0’ (Hindi) [Rs. 20.25 crore] and ‘Singh Is Blling’ [Rs. 20.67 crore]. Former had arrived on a regular Friday, though it did have an advantage of being a sequel and also been heralded with the tag of ‘the biggest and the costliest Indian film’ ever made. On the other hand ‘Singh Is Blling’ had released on the national holiday of Gandhi Jayanti.
In comparison, ‘Kesari’ is pretty much a standalone film with no conventional ‘hero heroine’ or ‘naach gaana’ angle, and mainly bringing to fore a patriotic action drama. Also, Akshay Kumar had a job in hand to single handedly bring on audiences in theatres as there was no part for a heroine to play and no other notable actor in a supporting part either.
Karan Johar made sure that from the marketing, promotion and release standpoint, ‘Kesari’ saw a very good platform for itself, what with an arrival at 3600 screens. Now what has to be seen is how big does the film grow from this point on. In their first three days, ‘2.0’ [Hindi], ‘Singh Is Bliing’ and ‘Gold’ had collected Rs. 63.25 crore, Rs. 54.44 crore and Rs. 43.45 crore respectively. Now by the look of things, ‘Kesari’ should manage to surpass them all comfortably, hence turning out to be the biggest of the lot.
Note: All collections as per production and distribution sources
