‘Badhaai Do’ Collects $1.03 Million Over First Weekend

Indian filmmaker Harshvardhan Kulkarni’s latest outing Badhaai Do is a warm film that is also an essential one. It features Rajkummar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar in the lead roles of a gay cop and a lesbian teacher. The Hindi film arrives four years after the apex court in India legalized homosexuality. Badhaai Do is the first Hindi movie to hit theatres after the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic hit India, and the box office report of the movie is quite encouraging.

Despite the film focusing on a subject that is still considered taboo in the society, Badhaai Do managed to make a decent collection in the first weekend of the theatrical release. It saw a slow start at the ticket windows on Friday, but the collection was at par with trade pundits’ the expectations. Badhaai Do opened to $ 0.21 million (Rs 1.65 crore) on Friday and picked up slightly on Saturday, collecting $0.36 million (Rs 2.72 crore).

Given the subject of the film, metro cities and tier one towns have contributed to majority of the ticket sales. Sunday collections saw nearly 27% rise and the film earned $0.45 million (Rs 3.45 crore) on the third day of the release. Badhaai Do has collected a total of $1.03 million (Rs 7.82 crore) in three days. The numbers are expected to stagnate, if not rise, on Monday as the audience celebrates Valentine’s Day and the footfall at movie theatres is likely to be better than a regular Monday.

Badhaai Do showcases the struggle that the LGBTQ community goes through for a normal life in India. The first half of the film indulges a lot in tokenism – the typical longshot of a couple by the beach, zoomed-in frames of accidental touch of the hands and the likes. The imageries are all fine, but only in isolation because the movie does not manage to establish an emotional connect of the characters until more than an hour into the film.

Thankfully, the movie more than compensates for the lost hour in the rest of the reel-time. The way realistic family and society have been woven into the narrative makes Badhaai Do more relatable for the masses. Writers Suman Adhikary, Akshat Ghildial and director Kulkarni have made a sensitive film about the rights of LGBTQ. Badhaai Do speaks to families that do not consider people from the community as normal, in their language, and attempts at making them open up and become more accepting.

Rao and Pednekar are in their best forms and the sweetest surprise package comes in the form of Gulshan Devaiah. He is an amazing actor and the role offers him the space to be the perfect tease to Rao’s character in the film.