Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia's supernatural thriller picked up steam on Saturday, though the reported Rs 80-150 crore budget means the real test starts this weekend.
The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest found its legs on Saturday. Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia's supernatural thriller collected an estimated Rs 11 crore net in India on Day 2, a 37.5% jump over its Friday opening of Rs 8 crore, according to Sacnilk data reported by Free Press Journal.
That takes the film's India net total to roughly Rs 19 crore after two days, with the India gross figure sitting near Rs 22.60 crore. Overseas, the film added about Rs 1.25 crore on Day 2, pushing its total overseas gross to Rs 2.25 crore. Add it all up and The Vvaan is sitting at a worldwide gross of approximately Rs 24.85 crore going into Sunday.
The growth is genuinely good news for a film that opened on the softer side. But the number that actually decides whether this counts as a win is the budget, and estimates on that vary wildly. Some reports peg the production cost at Rs 80 to 100 crore. Others, factoring in promotions and marketing spends, put the total closer to Rs 150 crore. If that higher figure holds, a Saturday bump alone doesn't get the film anywhere near safe territory. It needs Sunday and the following week to keep climbing at this rate, not just hold steady.
Directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra, the film follows Rishi and Mamta, played by Malhotra and Bhatia, who travel from Mumbai to their ancestral village of Devanchal for Chhath Puja and to sort out a land dispute. The trip pulls them into a forest around a temple devoted to Van Devi, a place villagers won't set foot in once the sun goes down. Anup Soni, Sunil Grover, Shweta Tiwari and Maniesh Paul round out the supporting cast.
Reviews have landed somewhere in the middle. Free Press Journal's own critic gave the film 2.5 stars, calling the premise interesting and the visuals striking, while flagging Mishra's direction as the weak link that turns it into what the review called a strictly one-time watch. For Malhotra's fans specifically, the same review said it's still worth a trip to the theatre.
The bigger context here is the traffic jam at the box office right now. The Vvaan opened the same weekend as the Avengers: Endgame re-release, and it's already outpacing that re-release on raw single-day numbers, which tells you more about a 2019 film's re-release ceiling than about The Vvaan's own strength. The real competition for screens and audience attention is only going to get tighter through the week.
So the question isn't whether Saturday was better than Friday. It clearly was. The question is whether Sunday keeps that 37% growth trajectory going, because a film carrying a reported Rs 150 crore price tag doesn't have room for a flat second weekend.
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