Last week, Kangana Ranaut’s Emergency and debutants Rasha Thadani and Aaman Devgan’s Azaad clashed at the box office, earning a lackluster start at the box office. Emergency and Azaad both saw poor opening days — like the rest of Bollywood — with Emergency earning a ₹2.5 crore and Azaad a ₹1.5 crore. Periodic drama Azaad, which also happened to be a biographical political drama, did not see any major change in subsequent days and went steady and utterly underwhelming.
Statutory estimates put Emergency’s opening week collection in India at ₹14.40 crore, which includes ₹1 crore added on the seventh day. Blue Film recorded a Hindi occupancy rate of 6.66 percent on Thursday, and Kolkata was best at 11.25 percent. While Ranaut’s popular decade-long career has given her several box office hits, the first-week box office figures of ₹14 crores haven’t lived up to the hype. Critics also said the film, depicting Ranaut as former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the Indian Emergency, did not get screened in Punjab because the Sikh community objected to the film — arguing it misrepresented them.
In fact, meanwhile, Abhishek Kapoor’s Azaad, with debutants Rasha Thadani (daughter of Raveena Tandon) and Aaman Devgan (nephew of Ajay Devgn), was just able to collect ₹42 lakh on its seventh day. Indian film’s total first-week collection rose by ₹6.77 crore with this. Though Ajay Devgn was involved with this project, it did not have much of a mark at the box office. Thursday, Chennai also recorded the highest Azaad occupancy rate at 68.67%, followed by Hindi at 6.29%. That reveals that megastar connections and previous experience didn’t pull crowds to theaters.
But both films have flopped, strikingly at the start of Kangana Ranaut’s audacious project and the debuts of two-star kids.
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