Saiyaara is seeing extraordinary advance bookings as the national chains easily head towards a 1-1.25 lakh figure and even a potential 20 crore nett first day number. It could even turn out to be the second highest opening day of the year and this with a film with no face value. There are simply no explanations when this happens.

The film is that heatbroken jilted lover type with music which holds appeal across the board but you cant expect a bumper opening just because of that. There are films that have done this before like Ek Villain (2014) and Kabir Singh (2019) which opened much higher than expected and to very high numbers for that time but they still had known faces.

Here with Saiyaara there are no known faces but today the box office is also much more extreme than those times as big films with stars can open to practically zero collections while films like Gadar 2, Chhaava, The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story and some films from the South go and do ridiculous numbers which are unthinkable pre release.

The unthinkable has also happened with Saiyaara and this advance itself practically ensures the film is at least a HIT. But as there is this huge crazy interest in the film you would hope that film also has the merits and goes on to be much more than a HIT. The film does have an offer as an incentive but that is pretty much irrelevant and is not really being taken up as not even 50 lakh gross has been used up till date. The advances opened early as they had support of the offer as normally you would open later with a film like this but in reality the film did not need the offer. The advances are extraordinary practically all over the country. A film which was releasing on 800-900 cinemas can now double that by the time it releases on Friday.

One big positive is how the makers have held back the lead artistes from the media, instagram and all that and not exposed them to that typical digital promotion. The reason why the industry is unable to create stars is because the artist gets over exposed on these channels / platforms and what they say and do does not relate with masses. The real personality gets exposed which does not match the attempted screen image which means you really have to be a very good at your job to be a star and actors who are very good will be always be at a minimum meaning hardly any box office stars.