Brahmastra beats The Kashmir Files to become no 1 Hindi film

Brahmastra Part One- Shiva is officially back on track. After four successive days, where the film’s domestic box office collections showed big drops, the film has picked up again in its second weekend. On its second Saturday – September 17 – the film showed a huge 50 percent growth in collections across India, raising promises of a healthy lifetime run. It also overtook The Kashmir Files in terms of global earnings to become this year’s highest-earning Hindi film.

As per trade sources, the Ayan Mukerji film, which stars Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt, earned somewhere between ₹15.5-16 crore nett in all languages across India on Saturday. In comparison, the film had earned ₹10.5 crore on Friday and just over ₹9 crore on Thursday, its lowest single-day figure so far. This takes its overall nett domestic collection just shy of ₹200 crore. Its gross worldwide collection is also nearing the ₹350 crore mark. This means that it has crossed The Kashmir Files’ lifetime earnings of ₹340 crore to become the highest-grossing Hindi film of the year.

The nett domestic collection of the film is now the second-highest for all Hindi films this year, crossing Kartik Aaryan’s Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, which collected ₹185 crore in India. In that list, Brahmastra is still behind Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files, which had nett collections of ₹252 crore. It is to be noted that The Kashmir Files’ budget of ₹15 crore was a mere fraction of Brahmastra’s overall budget.

Trade analysts have said that the jump on Sunday may not be as high now, but even a mild rise will give the film a chance to register a ₹40-crore second weekend, which is a very healthy number. The absence of major releases in this weekend has helped the film, something that will continue next weekend as well. In fact, Brahmastra virtually has no competition at the Indian box office till Vikram Vedha and Ponniyin Selvan: I arrive on September 30. That means the film should break into the ₹300-crore club domestically, if all goes well.

However, given the film’s huge ₹410-crore budget, the number may not be enough to call it a sure-shot hit. A lot of factors need to weighed in for that. But one thing is clear that the film has managed to get people back into the theatres, which many big Bollywood films had failed to do earlier this year.

Source: Hindustan Times