BO: How are last Friday's releases doing?

Barring films like Samantha’s Maa Inti Bangaram at the box office, there were no other films last week, and that gave an ample chance to Venaktesh Maha’s Rao Bahadhur and Abhishek Nama’s Naga Bandham, which took over the box office last Friday. Now that the first weekend is over, we have to see how these films are actually doing.

Nagabandham got praised for its visual effects, but the film lacked an emotional hook that would make the audience glued to their seats. Though the makers have trimmed down the film by 30 minutes, taking it to 2 hours 45 minutes, while the first release has a 3 hours 15 minutes runtime, it looks like the effect is not so positive. The film made a little over ₹12 crore gross in its first weekend, and that’s very poor compared to the ₹120 crore budget of the movie.

Similarly, we have Venkatesh Maha’s Rao Bahadhur movie, a psychological thriller which also happens to be a social satire in the director’s typical style. The film, made with a stunning budget, has failed to click and has collected around ₹5 crore gross in the first weekend from the Telugu states. That’s pretty low for a film that was hyped in a big way like that.

Coming to Bollywood, Alia Bhatt and Sharvari’s “Alpha” was released last week and made only ₹55 crore gross at the global box office. That’s pretty low for a film that’s made on such a huge scale. Only if the collections are par ₹150 crores from the first box office, this YRF spyverse film might have got a staggering start, otherwise, it’s impossible to pull huge budgets from now on.