How the predictions failed for Joker. It was expected that despite all the murmurs and speculations around the film, its director and the cast, audience won't be impacted to a very huge degree and give at least a fair start to Joker. At the bare minimum, at least a 50% opening was expected. Guess that was expecting a lot since the audience seemed to have made up their mind not to even step into theatres. Leave aside the word of mouthing spreading out - whether negative or positive - there were hardly any footfalls that resulted in the film being labelled as a box office failure by the time Friday came to close.
With an opening of merely 20% (which didn't really show much improvement over the weekend either), Joker continued to be poor all through. After the weekend collections in the range of 15-16 crores, the film doesn't carry many hopes in the rest of the week either. Despite the fact that it managed a solo release for itself and Ek Tha Tiger wasn't a huge competition any more, Joker has proved to be a downer at the box office. Though it is obvious that the film would suffer losses, the only silver lining is that the losses won't be of disastrous proportions since the film hasn't been sold at a very fancy price.
Meanwhile Akshay Kumar has moved on and is already eyeing OMG Oh My God! as his next money-spinner. Sonakshi Sinha has seen a break in her century run but has Son of Sardaar and Dabangg 2 lined up to bring her back in the reckoning rather soon. On the other hand Shirish Kunder could well be taking a short break before announcing his next.
Other releases of the week, I M 24, From Sydney With Love and Jalpari, didn't find any favour whatsoever from the audience. Poor release, negligible show count, abrupt arrival and hardly any mention from those within and outside the industry further proved to be a death knell for these small budget affairs. Each of these is a major commercial failure.
