A trade website's points system for Bollywood directors would push Siddharth Anand past Rohit Shetty into second place, though Aditya Dhar still tops the list by a distance.
Shah Rukh Khan's King hits screens December 24, and while everyone's busy speculating about the trailer, box office trackers have already started running the numbers on what a big opening could mean for the people behind the camera.
Koimoi runs something it calls the Director Box Office Power Index, a points system that rewards filmmakers for every Hindi film that crosses a crore-club threshold. Cross Rs 100 crore, get 100 points. Cross Rs 500 crore, get 500. Land a film in the top ten overseas grossers of all time, that's another 50. Add it all up and you get a running leaderboard of who's actually been delivering at the ticket window, not just who's been talked about.
Right now, Siddharth Anand sits third with 1,150 points, built on Pathaan crashing into the 500 crore club and Fighter landing in the 200 crore bracket. Rohit Shetty is ahead of him at 1,450, and Aditya Dhar tops the entire list by a wide margin with 2,200 points, a number nobody else in Bollywood is close to touching this year.
Here's the arithmetic on King. Anand needs the film to cross Rs 300 crore net in India. Do that, and his tally jumps to 1,450, level with Shetty on points. But level isn't the same as tied in this system. Ties get broken by looking at whose films have actually gone the highest, and Anand already has a 500-crore grosser in Pathaan. Shetty doesn't have one yet. So a 300-crore King doesn't just match Shetty, it puts Anand ahead of him and into second spot outright, with Dhar still untouchable at number one.
Whether King actually gets there is a separate conversation. Anand's last film with Khan, Pathaan, ran up massive numbers on the back of a genuine post-pandemic reopening moment for Hindi cinema, something that isn't guaranteed to repeat. Fighter, his other big swing, cleared 200 crore but didn't come close to Pathaan's territory. King will need to do real business in its opening weekend, not just generate noise online, for this points equation to matter at all.
There's also the small matter of what these rankings actually measure. They're built entirely around gross collections in fixed slabs, so a film that does Rs 299 crore counts for nothing extra over one that does Rs 200 crore, while Rs 300 crore flips the whole board. It's a neat number to argue about on a Wednesday afternoon, less so a verdict on anyone's filmmaking.
Still, December 24 is now doing double duty. It's a release date for King, and it's the date that decides whether Siddharth Anand spends 2027 introduced as Bollywood's number two box office director or stays exactly where he is.
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.