Vibe found some legs on its second day, but it's still got a long way to go before it looks anything close to a hit.

Kunal Kemmu's second film as director, after Madgaon Express, earned ₹2.65 crore net in India on Saturday across 2,979 shows, according to trade tracker Sacnilk. That's a 55.9% jump from its Friday opening of ₹1.70 crore net. Two days in, the film's India net stands at ₹4.35 crore, with the gross figure at ₹5.22 crore.

The growth is the kind of number a distributor points to when someone asks if word of mouth is working. But set it against the film's reported ₹35 crore budget and the picture looks different. Two days of business have recovered barely more than a tenth of that cost. Vibe needs its Sunday and the weekdays that follow to do a lot more heavy lifting.

What the film's actually about

Written, directed and headlined by Kemmu, Vibe follows two clueless best friends who stumble onto a terrorist plot and end up in a comic, chaotic mess they're nowhere near equipped to handle. Sparsh Shrivastava plays the other half of that duo, with Preity Zinta, Vanshika Dhir, Yashpal Sharma and Dinesh Lal Yadav rounding out the cast, and Sharmila Tagore turning up in a cameo.

The response so far has been mixed, and that split shows up in the reviews too. The Free Press Journal gave it 2.5 stars, calling it "enjoyable in parts, especially during its first half," with Kemmu and Shrivastava making "the journey watchable." The same review flagged a stretched second half and uneven writing as the drag on the experience, adding that anyone who skips it "isn't really missing out on something extraordinary" but that fans of commercial entertainers mixing action, comedy and drama "may find a few entertaining moments here."

That's about as middle-of-the-road as a verdict gets, and the box office numbers are tracking right alongside it. A comedy built around an unusual premise, some star power and a cameo from Sharmila Tagore was never going to be a guaranteed sell, and the opening weekend suggests audiences are still making up their minds theatre by theatre.

The real test comes with Sunday's numbers and then the first weekday, when the discount ticket crowd either shows up or doesn't. Given the gap between what's been earned and what was reportedly spent, Vibe has roughly a week to prove it can hold shows before exhibitors start cutting them.