Baahubali 2 clocks highest ever advance booking

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