Post Mortem A Weekly Box office Report
By SAMPURNMonday, August 30, 2010
August 30, 2010 (Sampurn Wire): Six films released over the Friday gone by and each of them - ‘Hello Darling’, ‘Aashayein’, ‘Madholal - Keep Walking’, ‘Antardwand’, ‘Soch Lo’ and ‘Gumshuda’ - fared miserably at the box office. In fact, as stated in last week’s column, barring ‘Hello Darling’ and ‘Aashayein’, none of the other releases managed to procure even an all - India release. Worse, these films were running at barely 1 - 2 shows and that too at handful of cinemas, wherever they released.
The terrible box office reception to these four films hasn’t come as a surprise though. One can be rest assured that even the makers here wouldn’t have expected any footfalls for these films. ‘Madholal - Keep Walking’, ‘Antardwand’, ‘Soch Lo’ and ‘Gumshuda’ - none of them came with any commercial trappings whatsoever and that reflected in the zero promotional drive before the release.
For ‘Antardwand’, the film with the most complex title of all, there was solace though in the form of all -around good reviews that it fetched for itself. In fact the commercial unawareness and hence the subsequent failure of this film proves once again that how a marketing genius like Aamir Khan does exceedingly well in backing projects that carry a good premise but fail due to zero interest level amongst the audience.
Even ‘Madholal - Keep Walking’ and ‘Soch Lo’ found decent reviews coming their way but to no avail. Expect the DVDs to be out soon. As for ‘Gumshuda’, the film stayed true to its title and was totally ‘gumshuda’ from screens with even critics not knowing where to go and watch it.
Let’s talk about the relatively bigger films of the week now. ‘Aashayein’, a film that had John Abraham as the star attraction, failed to pull any audiences whatsoever. In fact John Abraham, who had waited for long for the film to release, too smartly diverted the attention by beginning promotion for ‘Jhoota Hi Sahi’. Well, he can’t be blamed for that.
Subhash Ghai’s ‘Hello Darling’ didn’t find any takers either. The film did have a premise (sexual harassment) where dozens of funny incidents could have been interspersed into the narrative that would have kept the fun element going. However, this Gul Panag, Celina Jaitly and Eesha Koppikhar starrer (which was in the making for close to 3 years) was an embarrassment of a film and found complete rejection from the audience.
– Joginder Tuteja / Sampurn Wire
