Holiday Box Office Opening

Akshay Kumar’s Holiday has taken a shockingly poor start at the domestic box office, as the morning shows at most centres (both single-screens and multiplexes) opened to occupancy of less than 30%. A few centres in Gujarat and Delhi/UP have taken a decent start, but not close to as good as other ‘Post-IPL’ releases in the last few years

Holiday was the first big-budget release after Yash Raj Films’ Gunday (Feb 13) and the second film featuring an established superstar after Salman Khan’s Jai Ho (Jan 24). While the promotions were low-key throughout, three other factors could have resulted in an opening as poor as this – one, the theatrical trailer didn’t generate enough buzz, two, none of the songs in the music album gained popularity and three, the title of the film didn’t excite the mass-audience (Akshay’s strong fan base).

Occupancy for the morning shows — Mumbai city opened to around 25-30%, Bangalore was poor at 20-25%, Ahmedabad was better at 35%, Mangalore was extremely poor at 20%, Pune was around 25-30%.

Unless there is a huge turnaround as the day progresses, Holiday is likely to collect less than 10 crore on its opening day and would rely almost entirely on word-of-mouth publicity to recover costs.

Moving towards the more positive side of things, the reports from the first few shows are good. So the film could pick up towards the end of the day.