Global box office is still stuck on the whole “star power plus ip means buckets of cash” formula, but in India this weekend, the numbers said something different. Turns out, even if you’ve got Margot Robbie and Chris Hemsworth attached to a film, no amount of stardom can make up for a lack of marketing that actually speaks to local tastes. Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and the Chris Hemsworth thriller Crime 101 both tanked in India this weekend.
These two films came in with barely a whisper of promotion and a limited amount of screens, which of course meant they were hardly a threat to the homegrown movies currently masquerading as blockbusters.
Valentine’s Day Gives ‘Wuthering Heights’ a Little Love
Wuthering Heights managed to come out on top in the weekend’s fight for Hollywood supremacy, but it was a close call and not exactly a resounding victory. It opened on a pretty modest note of Rs 40 lakh on Friday and then basically took off on Saturday, thanks largely to the fact that it’s a period romance – the kind of thing that tends to get couples in the urban areas out of the house to watch on a Friday night. Saturday’s numbers were roughly 150% up on Friday, so that’s something, even if it was only a very short lived something.
Sunday’s numbers tell a different story, though: the film dropped right back down to around 60 lakh. Overall, Wuthering Heights took in a pretty paltry Rs 3 crore over the three days, and it’s looking like it’s got a long way to go just to break even by the end of the week.
‘Crime 101’ Struggles to Make a Mark
The Chris Hemsworth-starring thriller Crime 101 actually did worse – it opened to a pretty dismal Rs 25 lakh. To be fair to Hemsworth, he does tend to do pretty well in India – but that didn’t seem to make a difference this time around. The film didn’t even enjoy a decent Saturday growth, and Sunday was down again to Rs 35 lakh. That puts Crime 101 on a total of Rs 1.20 crore for the whole weekend – not exactly a number to write home about.
Analysis: When a Film Goes Quiet
This abysmal weekend for these two films is actually part of a bigger trend that’s been playing out in the Indian box office lately: The ‘mid-budget Hollywood import’ seems to have become a dying breed. You know, the kind of film that’s not quite big enough to get a massive push from the studio, but not small enough to fly under the radar either. We’ve seen films like Wuthering Heights and Crime 101 come in with no real fanfare, no dubbed versions of the film in local languages and no real push behind them – and it shows. In a market that’s currently awash with high-octane Indian action films like Border 2 and the latest Shahid Kapoor film, it looks like there’s no room at the inn for any Hollywood films that can’t put on the big show.
Right now, it looks like these two films are going to be streaming themselves to death – their theatrical run in India isn’t going to be any longer than it has to be.
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