Gadar 2 Box Office Collection: Historic Weekend Opening

The Deols are having quite a run at the box office this year. After Dharmendra got audiences cheering for his extended cameo in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani (2023), Sunny Deol returned to the big screen last week with director Anil Sharma’s Gadar 2: The Katha Continues — and Tara Singh is making history.    

According to reports from Bollywood Hungama, the film made Rs. 40.1 crore on Friday, Rs. 43.08 crore on Saturday, and approximately Rs. 51.50 crore on Sunday. The film is expected to cross the Rs. 200-crore mark soon. Having earned Rs. 134 crores in its first weekend, Gadar 2’s weekend collection is second only to Pathaan (2023) among this year’s blockbusters. It’s also the third in the list of Hindi films that made Rs. 100 crore in the shortest amount of time. (Pathaan tops the list, having reached the figure in two days.) 

Prior to Gadar 2’s release, trade analyst Sumit Kandel had posted on social media that the film was seeing a massive amount of advance bookings from single screen theatres. 

Box office trackers Sacnilk Entertainment reported that Gadar 2’s collection on Sunday was the highest third-day Hindi net collection of all time.  

Film exhibitor Akshaye Rathi said, “What's even more important than the numbers is the kind of reaction and the kind of consumption patterns that we are witnessing. It almost looks like we've gone 20 years back in time to the era when people used to celebrate films! It would be a carnival inside and outside the cinema halls. You're seeing some crazy things like long serpentine queues of people waiting to get a ticket. You're seeing people come in tractors to cinema halls in northern parts of the country to really celebrate it. You're seeing people singing along for some of the iconic songs that have been recreated. You're witnessing absolute euphoric reactions and madness in the aisles of cinema halls all over the country.”

The other release from last week was OMG 2, starring Pankaj Tripathi and Akshay Kumar, which has also done well minting Rs. 43.56 crore in its first weekend, according to Indian Express.

After the success of dubbed films like Pushpa (2021) and RRR (2022), there was much handwringing about mainstream Hindi films having lost its mojo. However, this year, good ole fashioned Bollywood seems to be set on reclaiming its audiences. The success of Gadar 2 and OMG 2 comes on the heels of Rocky Aur Rani…, which made it into the Rs. 100-crore club, and surprise hits like Satyaprem Ki Katha, which defied conventions by making the heroine a rape survivor. Clearly, the Hindi film industry is here to serve both the single screen and multiplex crowds.