Last week was a disappointment for the industry as both ‘Shehzada’ and ‘Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania’ underperformed. ‘Shehzada’ is expected to collect around Rs. 30-32 Crore in its lifetime while ‘Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania’ will struggle to reach the Rs. 40 Crore mark. The industry is now looking forward to seeing how ‘Selfiee’ performs, although the hopes are minimal.
‘Selfiee’ stars Akshay Kumar, Emraan Hashmi, Nushrratt Bharuccha and Diana Penty. It is directed by Raj Mehta of ‘Good Newwz’ (2019) and ‘Jugjugg Jeeyo’ (2022) fame and is an official Hindi remake of the Malayalam film, ‘Driving License’ (2019). The trailer is decent and the remix of the song “Main Khiladi Tu Anari”, featuring Akshay Kumar and Emraan Hashmi, has got noticed. The makers have gone all out to promote the film. Yesterday, Akshay Kumar set a Guinness World Record for clicking as many as one hundred eighty-four selfies with his fans in less than three minutes!
However, the buzz for the film is limited. Thankfully, the original version isn’t available in the Hindi dubbed version. But the storyline from ‘Selfiee’s trailer reminds viewers of ‘Fan’ (2016), starring Shah Rukh Khan.
Last week, ‘Shehzada’s booking opened very early and it led to negativity as hardly a few thousand tickets were sold. Probably, the makers of ‘Selfiee’ didn’t want a repeat of this fiasco. Hence, ‘Selfiee’s booking was opened late, on Wednesday evening. As expected, the advance is not much.
‘Shehzada’ opened at Rs. 5.75 Crore and the aim of ‘Selfiee’ should be to go beyond this number and open in the range of Rs. 6-7 Crore. A weekend of Rs. 25-30 Crore would be ideal. If the word of mouth is positive, it can have a clean run for twelve days until the release of Ranbir Kapoor-starrer ‘Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar’ on March 8. And if reports are bad, it might have a lifetime similar to that of ‘Shehzada’.
