Gangubai Kathiawadi, starring Alia Bhatt, has earned over Rs 60 crore (nett) at the box-office even before the end of its first week.
The Hindi film, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, managed to rake in close to Rs 40 crore in its opening weekend alone. It is expected to pull in more crowds with Maharashtra theatres now permitted to operate at 100% capacity again. However, Gangubai Kathiawadi will face some competition from Amitabh Bachchan’s Jhund, which is releasing on Friday.
Loosely based on a chapter from Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges’ book, Mafia Queens of Mumbai, Gangubai Kathiawadi has Bhatt playing one of the most influential women in Kamathipura, a red-light district in Mumbai. It had the second-biggest opening for a female-led film in India.
The Bhatt-starrer has performed on par with the pre-pandemic Bhansali film Bajirao Mastani (2015), which had collected around Rs 46 crore by the end of its first weekend. In fact, Gangubai Kathiawadi stands a good chance of catching up to the box-office numbers of the director’s last two films. This is significant as both those films featured two A-list stars – Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone – in the lead and were released in the pre-pandemic era.
While Gangubai Kathiawadi did not do as well as expected on Maha Shivratri holiday, it has still managed to reach an excellent Rs 61 crore (nett) in six days. It is expected to close out its first week with somewhere around Rs 66 crore, thus making it easy for the film to reach the 100-crore mark.
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However, it remains to be seen how well it does in the face of the release of Jhund, which marks Bachchan’s return to the big screen after Chehre last year. Written and directed by Nagraj Manjule, Jhund is based on the life of retired sports teacher, Vijay Barse, who founded an NGO called ‘Slum Soccer’.
But, regardless of its future prospects, Gangubai Kathiawadi has already become one of the biggest earners for the Hindi film industry in the post-pandemic era, after Akshay Kumar’s Sooryavanshi. The film has brought in significantly more audience than the last theatrical release in Hindi, Badhaai Do, and is expected to bring in even more.