‘Selfiee’ Touches $1 Million In First Weekend

Akshay Kumar’s latest outing, Selfiee, has proved to be one of his most unsuccessful films in the recent past – the collections for the Hindi movie barely touched $1 million in three days at the ticket windows in India. Directed by Raj Mehta, Selfiee is a remake of the 2019 Malayalam film Driving Licence and earned roughly $1.2 million over the first three days of the release.

Kumar’s new film has emerged as a disappointment to trade experts – most of them had predicted $0.5 million to $1 million opening day collection and nearly $2-2.5 million for the weekend. Selfiee failed to even touch the lower level of the expected range. It made an opening day collection of $0.307 million in India.

Prithviraj Sukumaran essayed the role of a movie star in the original movie and Kumar plays the star in the Hindi version. In the original film, Suraj Venjaramoodu played the role that Emraan Hashmi has been roped in for the Hindi one – an ardent fan of the movie star and an officer who supervises the making of driver’s license in the city. Nushratt Bharuccha plays Hashmi’s wife while Diana Penty is Kumar’s wife in Selfiee.

Made on an estimated budget of $18.11 million, Selfiee is on the wrong footing with the three-day collections. The film was not placed to be the best scorer either – it released across 1200 screens in India while a normal Kumar film usually takes anything between 2000-4000 screens.

Critics and audiences have had a dull response to Selfiee because of a failed attempt to remake a film (Driving License) that had little critical value itself and the lead character’s lack of an engrossing arc. The characters and personalities of the star as well as the fan were established well in the original but the Hindi version does not spend much time or effort doing that. Even Kumar’s charm – a trait that attracts his own fan following and manages to pump up box office numbers – failed to work for Selfiee. The main problem with the film is the half-hearted way with which it has been written. The characters fail to develop any emotional connect with the audience, thereby giving all the dramatic moments of the film an unrealistic touch.

After Kartik Aaryan’s Shehzada failed to recreate the magic of Bhool Bhulaiyya 2, Selfiee has also majorly disappointed at the box office. Both the films are remakes of south Indian films – Shehzada is the Hindi remake of Allu Arjun’s Telugu film Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo.

Selfiee is the fifth Akshay Kumar film in a row to score such low figures at the ticket windows. After he gave the first Bollywood hit post-pandemic with Rohit Shetty’s Sooryavanshi in 2021, Kumar has not had a single box office hit.

His first theatrical release after Sooryavanshi was Bachchhan Pandey – a Farhad Samji film that was widely panned by critics and had a dismal box office record. His first 2022 release – the much-awaited historical drama Samrat Prithviraj also failed miserably and so did the Anand L Rai’s Raksha Bandhan. The film Ram Setu earned a little below $12.5 million but it was made on an estimated budget of $19 million, and did not emerge as a hit film.