Veer Pahariya's follow-up to Sky Force crashed against Drishyam 3's juggernaut run, recovering barely a twentieth of its reported budget over its opening weekend.
Veer Pahariya's second film as an actor has opened to numbers nobody in Mumbai is going to frame on a wall. Prem Keetanu, released on Gandhi Jayanti alongside Drishyam: The Conclusion, has made just Rs 1.16 crore net in its first three days, according to Koimoi's box office tracking.
That is not a typo. It is 98% lower than Pahariya's debut film Sky Force, which opened across a single weekend to Rs 62.25 crore net riding on Akshay Kumar's star pull. Prem Keetanu had no such cushion.
The film opened on 1,886 screens nationwide and still managed only Rs 50 lakh net on day one. By Sunday, exhibitors had already pulled it down to 818 screens, and the day brought in Rs 28 lakh. Add it up across the weekend and you get a number that barely registers against the film's reported production cost.
Koimoi pegs that budget at Rs 20-25 crore. Three days in, Prem Keetanu has recovered somewhere between 4.64% and 5.8% of that spend. Koimoi's own projection has the film settling at a lifetime net of Rs 3-5 crore, which would make it one of this year's clearer washouts rather than a slow-burn recovery story.
Part of the problem was timing. Drishyam 3 landed the same Friday and has been eating every available screen and headline since, leaving Prem Keetanu with declining show counts by its second day out. Part of it was also the film itself never generating much pre-release noise. What conversation there was centred almost entirely on its connection to Premalu, the Malayalam sleeper hit. Prem Keetanu isn't a scene-for-scene lift, Koimoi notes, but the Hindi version keeps the Malayalam film's core intact, with several sequences adapted directly.
Aafiya Sayed co-stars opposite Pahariya, with Aparshakti Khurana, Nikhil Vijay and Rakesh Bedi rounding out the cast. Apoorv Singh Karki directs, and Gaurav Verma produces under the Avanika Films, Bhavana Studios and Phars Film banners, with Phars handling distribution.
For Pahariya, the comparison to Sky Force stings precisely because that film proved he could hold a frame next to an established star. Prem Keetanu was supposed to answer whether he could carry one on his own name. The opening weekend numbers suggest that question is still open, and the film's own trajectory, down to under a thousand screens by day three, isn't leaving it much room to answer differently in week two.
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.