Ranbir Kapoor's Ramayana: Part I sold nearly 85,000 tickets within hours of advance booking opening, even as a reported standoff between Dharma Productions and exhibitors held up the morning's show count.
Rs 2,770 for a recliner seat. That's what PVR ICON at Phoenix Palladium in Mumbai is charging for the 6:55 PM IMAX 3D show of Ramayana: Part I on November 5 and 6, and people are paying it.
Advance booking for Nitesh Tiwari's two-part retelling of the epic opened on Tuesday, October 20, timed to Dussehra. By 8 AM the next morning, the film had sold 84,969 tickets across 104 cities and pulled in Rs 4.88 crore, according to numbers reported by Bollywood Shaadis. Strip out block bookings and the figure settles at Rs 3.05 crore, still a big number for a film that's a fortnight from release.
The Hindi version is doing almost all the heavy lifting, accounting for Rs 4.62 crore of the total, roughly 95 per cent. The dubbed versions are a rounding error by comparison. Kannada has brought in Rs 24.92 lakh, Telugu just Rs 47,400, though Sacnilk data puts Kannada second among the dubbed editions for tickets sold so far. Occupancy sits at 11 per cent, which is early-days math for a film that hasn't hit theatres yet.
Geography tells its own story. Delhi-NCR leads with 18,674 tickets worth Rs 1.42 crore. Mumbai follows at 14,823 tickets for Rs 1.01 crore, and the city is doing that despite some of the steepest ticket prices in the country, which says something about appetite. Pune, Kolkata and Bengaluru trail with roughly 4,000 to 4,200 tickets each.
For the committed, Mumbai has options at both ends of the clock. The earliest show is 6:45 AM at Miraj Cinemas IMAX in Wadala, the last one 11:45 PM at Maison INOX, Jio World Plaza, BKC. Somewhere in between, presumably, is a normal human being's showtime.
What held things up
Bookings were only open for a limited set of morning shows initially, and the reason, according to reports, is a tussle between Dharma Productions and exhibitors over how the revenue gets split. The standard arrangement gives distributors 52.5 per cent in week one, 45 per cent in week two and 37.5 per cent in week three. Dharma is said to be pushing for 60, 50 and 40 per cent instead, arguing the film's scale and the noise around it justify a bigger cut. Dharma bought the pan-India distribution rights to both parts of Ramayana for over Rs 250 crore earlier this year, so the math matters to them.
Neither side has confirmed where that negotiation stands, and it isn't clear yet whether it will affect how many screens open up as November 5 gets closer.
Meanwhile, the marketing machine isn't slowing down. Alongside the booking window, the makers dropped a clip of Yash's Ravana dancing to a track called Ravana Tandav, which is exactly the kind of thing that keeps a timeline busy for a fortnight. Whether the exhibitor dispute resolves before release weekend is the thing to watch now.
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