Brahmastra was released ten days back amidst huge negativity in the digital world and social media but it has come through all that as it sees shows going house full in the SECOND weekend when post pandemic this has been a task in the first weekend.

The negativity for this film hit a crescendo as the feeling out there was that Laal Singh Chaddha had flopped badly due to the negativity and the industry is to blame here as when you also put the failure down to the backlash in the digital world then you add more fuel to the fire and this extra fuel had to be faced by Brahmastra as it was the next big release and the biggest film ever made in the Hindi film industry.

Due to the backlash there was always going to denial if the film succeeded unless it hit out of the park which it has not done. Initially the opening was supposed to be fake, then the film was to crash, the collections were said to be inflated if not inflated they were bought but at the end of the day the collections are still coming and will continue to come for sometime yet. Then on top you have these huge budgets numbers coming out which are insane and mainly put out so the box office looks small in terms of budget. 

The irony of inflated collections was that this partly coming from the South also when all the industry from the big Hollywood studios to other knows exactly what goes on there with the films down there. But when the tide in going a certain way you join the bandwagon for some traction even though its a comedy show due to what goes on in your own backyard which is at another level.

The second weekend business has ensured the film has emerged a HIT as far as theatrical business goes and that is in India and Overseas. There is now the recovery part of the film and as the film has done well at the box office you get 600 and 700 crore budget numbers going around to push a certain narrative of huge losses.

The facts are that the film had the highest budget ever for Hindi cinema and the highest marketing costs ever but there is a rebate coming from DNEG from whom the visual effects were sourced out to and after this it will be looking at a landing cost of 375-400 crore.

Now if we take this 400 crore number then there is going to apprx 50% recovery from theatres worldwide, music rights and miscellaneous which is 200 crore revenue apprx. After this there is digital and satellite revenue to come and here due to a certain narrative people will just make up their own figures and values.

The rights for digital are with the produces Fox Studios and will remain in house with Hotstar and Star TV and a value will be alligned to them in the books. Recently we had two huge releases which clashed and fared very poorly at the box office but like Brahmastra the digital and satellite rights remained in house and with sister companies and one film had a value of 175 crore and the other film 120 crore.

There other big budget releases post pandemic which have sold digital and satellite to third parties and got amounts as below.

Samraat Prithviraj -160 crore

Shamshera 150 crore

Sooryavanshi 165 crore 

83 - 80 crore

Now be it a book value in house or a third party deals the numbers are high as where is this recovery coming from and this does not just apply for the above films which did not do well barring Sooryavanshi but even for the blockbuster films like Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, RRR and KGF2. 

Now whatever value is given for Brahmastra it is pretty clear that the losses are not going to huge on paper at least. Now are digital and satellite worth these huge prices, that is another story and for us it is a simple NO but at the moment these are the values that recent films big films have got.

Like Sooryavanshi this film would not have been put in the HIT category before the pandemic but the facts are that although we may believe the satellite and digital prices are high and a bubble the weightage in terms of recovery than before the pandemic is higher for digital and satellite. Pre pandemic this film would have probably have been marked a notch lower but there is also the case it may have done more if it released pre pandemic and the costs would have been lower which would have more than equalled things up.