HIT & Shabaash Mithu Box Office Day 1: Rajkummar Rao's thriller gets rocky start; Taapsee Pannu's sports biopic fails to engage audiences

The First Hit: The First Case did poorly at the box office, earning roughly Rs 1.15 crore nett, less than Khuda Haafiz from the previous week and Rashtra Kavach Om from the week before. Little was anticipated from the movie because the trailer lacked appeal and face value to draw in viewers at first. The trailer or a song must function when there is no face value.

As per Box Office India, the movie did take off in the evening because it didn't seem like it would make the Rs 1 crore nett mark in the afternoon, but it doesn't really matter because of where you can go from this kind of start. Naturally, the expectation is that it will increase by 100% or even more on Saturday, which might give it a chance.

The portal also reported that Shabaash Mithu did considerably worse, earning only about Rs 40 lakh net on the first day. After 83, the movie is another biopic about a cricket player, but this one is about a woman Mithali Raj. Even though this movie's production costs are very high for a female-oriented movie with minimal face value, it has nothing going for it compared to 83, which was a disaster but had a massive budget and a lot of publicity. With such a slow start, the film doesn't have much of a jump.

These movies will be referred to as "streaming movies," and if the producers had gone straight to OTT, they would have created a false impression of audience love and appreciation because there is only one. Looking at box office results and the demographics of the box office over the past six months, it is more certain that only one movie that went to OTT would have succeeded: Laxmii.

According to the trading website, the issue with movies like Hit and Shabaash Mithu is that their principal characters, Rajkummar Rao and Taapsee Pannu, are tested by their box office performances. Naturally, with better material, you could get away with using these kinds of actors, or, perhaps more accurately, you had gotten away with it before the pandemic. The pandemic has now changed the postings and content format to be more cinematic to attract a wider audience. It will become more and more difficult for this kind of basic acting and filmmaking to thrive.