When Dhurandhar The Revenge did a hat-trick of ₹ 100-crore days at the Indian box office earlier this year, it was seen as an oddity, an anomaly. On its first Monday, the Nitesh Tiwari film minted ₹ 107.50 crore in India. Trade pundits argued that the combination of high ticket prices and hype would be hard to emulate. Ramayana proved them wrong in just eight months.
Two years later, it released in Russia and became a cultural phenomenon. For the longest time, Indian films’ box-office earnings were measured solely by their domestic box-office takings. There were exceptions. Awara and Sangam were hits in Russia, while Caravan had a great run in China. But the measure of a film’s success remained what it did in India. By that metric, Mithun Chakraborty ’s Disco Dancer was a moderate success. It remains one of the most-watched films in Russia even four decades later. In the 90s, Indian films began to release overseas as the diaspora opened new markets for Bollywood. But no Indian film reached the mark at the Indian box office for years.
It earned ₹ 6 crore in India upon release in 1985. After its release in Russia, Disco Dancer’s worldwide earnings grew to ₹ 100 crore. Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge rode on this overseas wave to cross ₹ 100 crore worldwide.
Because most Indian films did not have a wide release overseas, that is.
This evolution has seen the industry’s blockbusters grow from earning ₹ 1 crore in their lifetime to ₹ 100 crore in a day. Dadasaheb Phalke’s Lanka Dehen, considered the first ‘hit’, ran for 23 weeks upon release in 1917. But it wasn’t until 1940 that independent bodies and film journalists began to calculate films’ earnings. The Gyan Mukherjee film, starring Ashok Kumar, rode the nationalistic wave and the thriller genre’s appeal to mint ₹ 1 crore. It is estimated the film sold 3.75 crore tickets in India at the time (the same as Dhurandhar 1). Kismet held the record for five years until the Tamil film Chandralekha minted ₹ 1.55 crore in 1948, snatching the crown. For instance, Amitabh Bachchan’s debut film Saat Hindustani released in Delhi in 1969 and in Bombay only two years later. The film minted ₹ 1.06 crore on its first day. This feat made ₹ 1 crore an aspirational opening figure for Bollywood, a trend that persisted till multiplexes arrived a few years later. The average ticket price in India increased from ₹ 25 in 2001 to ₹ 70 in 2008, according to Box Office India. And in 2008, a Hindi film finally earned ₹ 100 crore net domestically. It was Aamir Khan ’s Ghajini that created the 100-crore club. Since then, over 150 films have joined the ranks from across languages and industries. It had to be a ‘100-crore hit ’.
That is why most Indian films were released in some markets on one date and in others weeks or even months later. The two films have set and solidified this new standard for what a Hindi film can and should make at the domestic box office to be a red-letter day. It is remarkable that just over a decade ago, this figure was considered good enough for a film’s lifetime run. But the evolution of Hindi cinema’s box-office fortunes has always been that rapid. Box-office tabulation wasn’t always systematic in Indian cinema. In the pre-independence era, footfalls were counted. Sometimes, films’ runs were measured by how long they ran in theatres. Three years later, Kismet emerged as Hindi cinema’s first blockbuster. But it laid the foundation for ‘crore’ to be used as a common term for Indian cinema’s box-office earnings. From the 1950s to the 80s, Indian films almost always had staggered releases. Prints existed as large spools of reels. Transporting them across the country took time and effort. This meant that the concept of an ‘opening day or weekend’ was absent. Films grew by word of mouth only. That changed in the 90s as the distribution network grew, allowing filmmakers to release films almost simultaneously nationwide. The first film to utilise this was Mukul Anand’s Trimurti. The action entertainer starred Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, and Shah Rukh Khan. It came out two months after DDLJ, which had made Shah Rukh a big star. Anil and Jackie were already established names. The hype made Trimurti the biggest opener in Bollywood history. It was the multiplex era that guaranteed wide national releases as theatre chains allowed distributors to lock screens nationwide. This also led to an increase in ticket prices. This led to a boom in box-office earnings, too. This also created a new benchmark for measuring an Indian film’s success.
