Baahubali 2 clocks highest ever advance booking
NEW DELHI: Online ticketing platform BookMyShow sold over 1 million tickets for director SS Rajamouli’s immensely anticipated epic fantasy Baahubali 2: The Conclusion within 24 hours of bookings for the movie opening in north India. The sales are the highest ever on BookMyShow, beating the record held by Aamir Khan’s Dangal, which Rajamouli’s film had surpassed by 45% on Wednesday.
While single-screen cinemas had opened their booking windows as early as April 22, multiplexes went live by April 24 and together they accounted for ticket sales of more than 1 million in all the four languages the war epic is releasing in — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.
Bookings in south India opened by Wednesday but considering the number of unaccounted single screens and smaller presence of services like BookMyShow in the region, it would be difficult to gauge overall numbers, said independent trade analyst Sreedhar Pillai.
The film is releasing in 6,000 screens across India, surpassing by a wide margin big-ticket Bollywood offerings that take up a maximum of 4,500 cinemas.
“That’s more than the average Hindi film starring stars such as Salman or Aamir Khan,” said Atul Mohan, editor of trade magazine Complete Cinema. “Baahubali 2 has gone far beyond the expectations for any south Indian film and is widely being looked at as the first pan-India movie.”
Tickets for the Prabhas and Rana Daggubati-starrer were exorbitantly priced. PVR Director’s Cut in Delhi, for example, is selling tickets at ₹2,400 compared to the ₹1,200-1,400 for a regular film and ₹1,800-2,000 for a big release, he added.
PVR-ICON in Mumbai, on the other hand, has gone for ₹1,500 as opposed to the ₹700-800 range viewers are used to. Single screens in the north, Pillai said, were likely to charge anything between ₹150 and ₹200.
The scene in south India is unlikely to be as outrageous. Most states place a ceiling on the maximum price multiplexes can charge for movie tickets although black marketing of tickets may start on Friday.
Big-ticket films like Baahubali or previously Rajinikanth’s Kabali haven’t remained immune from ticket scalping on opening days. However, for all practical purposes, multiplexes in a city like Chennai, for example will charge ₹120 for a Baahubali ticket while single screens should ask for around ₹200.
“We expect the movie to perform extraordinarily well at the south Indian box office. The Andhra Pradesh and Telangana governments have given permission to increases ticket prices to ₹160 for single screens and to ₹200 for multiplexes,” said Ashish Saksena, chief operating officer, cinemas at BookMyShow.
“The four languages combined should bring in about ₹100 crore on day one, ₹300-350 crore by the end of the weekend and close to ₹500 crore within the first week,” Mohan said.
The first part of Rajamouli’s war epic had earned in excess of ₹500 crore worldwide when it released in 2015.
The two parts star Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty, Tamannaah Bhatia, Ramya Krishnan and Sathyaraj in lead roles.