Fourteen days after release, ‘Prahaar – The Ujjwal Nikam Story’ has reached a worldwide theatrical gross of Rs 28.61 crore. Against the film’s reported Rs 60 crore production budget, that leaves a gap of Rs 31.39 crore — a shortfall its remaining theatrical days are unlikely to erase.
The Rajkummar Rao and Wamiqa Gabbi courtroom drama earned Rs 28 lakh net in India on Thursday, its fourteenth day, across 1,156 shows. That is the closing line of a second week that settled at Rs 4.42 crore net, down sharply from the Rs 17.15 crore net the film collected in week one.
The numbers behind the decline
The second week began with Rs 60 lakh on Friday, improved to Rs 1.15 crore on Saturday and Rs 1.20 crore on Sunday, then thinned out: Rs 45 lakh each on Monday and Tuesday, Rs 29 lakh on Wednesday and Rs 28 lakh on Thursday, across 7,486 shows for the week.
- Domestic net: Rs 21.57 crore after 14 days
- India gross: Rs 25.66 crore; overseas gross: Rs 2.95 crore
- Week two: Rs 4.42 crore net, versus Rs 17.15 crore in week one
Occupancy tells the rest of the story. Day 14’s overall figure was 9.69 percent, with night shows the strongest at 12.69 percent and morning shows the weakest at 3.62 percent. The film recorded 14,697 admissions on Thursday, taking total footfalls to 998,252.
A serious courtroom drama that couldn’t cross over
The trajectory matters because of what the film is: a fact-based legal drama about public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam and the cases he argued, including the 1993 Bombay blasts and the 2008 Mumbai attacks. It stars Rajkummar Rao and Wamiqa Gabbi, with Lalit Prabhakar, Jaideep Ahlawat and Sikandar Kher. This kind of film depends on word of mouth and mature audiences rather than a franchise hook, and the weekday erosion suggests it never found that second wave.
The screen count shows how quickly the market moved on. The film opened on 4,133 screens; by its second Friday it was down to 849, a hard signal that exhibitors had priced in the decline before the week began.
What the gap does and does not mean
The Rs 31.39 crore shortfall compares the reported production budget with theatrical gross alone. The final economics will also depend on streaming, satellite and music revenue, which can materially close the distance for a star-led Hindi film. Still, the theatrical number sets the narrative for a release of this scale.
What happens next is a question of ancillaries. With the theatrical window nearing its end, the film’s long-term value will be decided by streaming and satellite deals, which are reported separately — and for a title built around a real-life legal figure, the catalogue life may outlast the screen run.
For Rajkummar Rao, among Hindi cinema’s most dependable performers, the underperformance is a reminder that critical goodwill does not automatically translate into theatrical pull for a sombre subject. The one scheduling signal worth keeping is the night-slot strength: for any residual shows, evening and night placements make more sense than mornings.
Source: The Times of India
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