Despite earning mixed to unfavorable reviews from all quarters, Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal, starring Ranbir Kapoor, broke additional box office records on Sunday, becoming an extraordinary success story. The action movie even beat the three-day total of Pathaan, starring Shah Rukh Khan, directed by Siddharth Anand, throughout the day, but it couldn’t match the record set by Atlee Kumar’s SRK movie Jawan. In addition, Animal became the second movie of the year to break into the Rs 200 crore club in India and the Rs 350 cr club globally in less than three days, following Jawan.
According to early estimates by industry tracker Sacnilk, Animal made Rs 72.50 crore on its third day of release in the domestic market. This is an 8.5% increase in daily box office profits over the day before. As a result, Animal’s domestic net revenue over three days was Rs 202.57 crore, significantly over Pathan’s Rs 166.75 crore and just below Jawan’s Rs 206.06 crore. Animal’s global gross collection is estimated by trade expert Ramesh Bala to be Rs 360 crore. He tweeted, “#Animal grosses a whopping ₹ 360 Crs at the WW Box office for the 3-day opening weekend.” In the first three days, Jawan, the highest earner of the year, brought in Rs 384.6 crore, while Pathaan brought in Rs 313 crore.
The movie’s first Sunday domestic net receipts of Rs 60.75 crore were higher than Pathan’s, but still fell short of Jawan’s Rs 80.1 crore. Even still, Gadar 2, starring Sunny Deol and Ameesha Patel and regarded as a historic hit by many, made just Rs 51.7 crore on its opening Sunday in theaters. It is unclear if Animal will perform higher in the test on Monday than Pathan (Rs 26.5 crore), Jawan (Rs 32.92 crore), and Gadar 2 (Rs 38.7 crore).
In the Hindi market on Sunday, Animal had an overall occupancy rate of 79.05 percent. At the beginning of the morning screenings, the Hindi market had a 65.53% occupancy rate for the film. The percentages did, however, steadily rise during the day, hitting 86.42 in the evening performances and 84.58 in the afternoon shows. During the night screenings, the percentage decreased little to 79.66.
Animal is smashing box office records, but it’s also been under fire from critics for being extremely violent, obscene, and misogynistic. Some viewers have even called it out on these points.
