83 will suffer the biggest loss in the history of Hindi cinema as it beats the unwanted records of Bombay Velvet (2015) which had lost around 70 crore. There was also Zero (2018) but that film covered the costs but obviously a value has to be given for the remenuration of Shahrukh Khan and at that time the digital rights were fair value for a star price for a big budget film. So it worked out at a 70 crore value meaning similar loss to Bombay Velvet though on paper only as the star is the producer so there is no loss though if someone else produced the film then the loss would be there.

Here with 83 it has suffered on two fronts one is obviously the poor box office response in India and the second was that one of the OTT partners refused to budge from an older deal and take the film for a four week window OTT release. This was mainly because of inflated deals of two earlier films from the same studio and these films were huge duds.

A new deal with a four week window could have cut the losses of the film by around 30-35 crore but it was not be. The recovery of the film will be 80 crore apprx from theatres across the world. There will be 50 crore coming from Star / Hotstar for satellite and digital rights and another 30 crore from Netflix for digital rights. There will another 20 crore from music and regional satellite. This will take the recovery of the film to 180 crore.

The budget of the film was 240 crore plus 20 crore for P&A taking it to 260 crore. There were interest costs on this budget due to the delayed release due to the pandemic but to counteract there will be around 25-30 crore coming from UK rebate which will take care of most of the interest costs. So its a 260 crore cost and recovery will be around 180 crore from all revenue sources giving it an 80 crore loss.

A better digital deal could have given a lesser loss but the bigger issue is the outright rejection by the public and the crashing collections as that is actually where a film fails and succeeds, the recovery and financials depend a lot on striking deals at the right time. The film stands today with the highest loss ever but if a it got a better digital deal and had no interest costs piling up the losses would have been minimal but that will not change the fact of the huge rejection from the audience. Sooryavanshi releases earlier had a recovery of almost 300 crore thanks to better box office and higher value for satellite, digital and music.

There is some bad luck involved in the film having to suffer these record losses but there is no bad luck in the film being bad and unable to sustain even its low box office collections.