The curtain came down on week one, and the applause, honestly, was a lot thinner than anyone expected.
Ten days in, and Pawan Kalyan’s Ustaad Bhagat Singh finds itself in that awkward, uncomfortable stretch of a theatrical run where the opening buzz has faded and the weekday reality has set in hard. The numbers are out. They’re not pretty. And no amount of trade spin is going to change what they say.
March 19 felt like a real occasion. The Ugadi release, the superstar name above the title, the years of build-up. Opening day pulled in Rs 41 crore across more than 4,600 shows, which is the kind of figure that makes you feel like the momentum is there, that the audience has shown up, that everything could still go the way the optimists predicted. But you know how this goes. Day one numbers in Indian cinema are often the most misleading piece of data in the whole conversation.
The second day already felt different. Quieter. And then the weekdays arrived, and any lingering hope of a slow-burn recovery got swallowed almost entirely by the colossal noise coming from the screen next door.
Because here’s the thing nobody wanted to say out loud at the time: releasing on the same date as Ranveer Singh’s Dhurandhar: The Revenge was either very brave or very miscalculated, and ten days later, the distinction barely matters. Dhurandhar crossed Rs 500 crore in India in five days alone, dominating every multiplex screen that mattered, swallowing up the oxygen, the conversation, the social media timelines. Ustaad Bhagat Singh, by comparison, was trying to hold its ground with a torch while the other film had stadium floodlights. The scale of the mismatch was something the trade saw coming; the audience simply confirmed it with their wallets.
By the second week, the daily figures started telling the story with that specific kind of bluntness only box office numbers can manage. Wednesday brought in Rs 1.35 crore, Thursday dropped to Rs 1.00 crore, and Friday nudged back to Rs 1.10 crore. Small recoveries, survivalist numbers, the kind of film produced when it’s holding on rather than growing.
The second Saturday, which should have been a genuine bounce-back day, came in at an estimated Rs 0.61 crore. The ten-day cumulative total settled at Rs 80.7 crore across 26,672 shows, with just under 3.9 million people having walked through the doors. Theatres were running at 18 to 22 per cent occupancy. That’s not a film in recovery. That’s a film in its final stretch.
And somewhere in the accounting rooms at Mythri Movie Makers, the gap between a reported Rs 150 crore budget and the current Rs 91-odd crore worldwide gross is not a comfortable conversation to be having.
Truth is, the critics didn’t really soften the blow either. They came in, they watched, and most of them left feeling like they’d been here before. Deccan Chronicle gave it 1.5 out of 5, calling it predictable and outdated, a film that failed to capitalise on its star power. India Today said something similar but with a bit more texture, suggesting Pawan Kalyan fans would find their moments, but general audiences would feel the film expected them to leave too much at the door before stepping in. The Indian Express cut straight to it: fans will cheer, everyone else has already seen a better version of this film somewhere.
That last line sticks. Because it points at something real, something the industry has been circling for a while now without quite saying it directly. The era of a superstar name carrying a film over the finish line on sheer personality alone is not what it used to be. It still works for opening day. The faithful always show up for day one. But day five, day eight, day ten? That’s where the film has to earn it on its own terms, and Ustaad Bhagat Singh, by most accounts, didn’t quite manage that.
Which is genuinely a shame, because the premise isn’t without feeling. A tribal boy, shaped and named by a teacher who sees something in him, grows up carrying that moral weight into a world that keeps testing it. There’s something in that worth investing in. The problem, repeated across most reviews and plenty of audience feedback, is that the screenplay doesn’t quite honour the premise it set up. It leans on the star and hopes that’s enough. Sometimes it is. This time, it wasn’t.
Sreeleela and Raashii Khanna are both in the film, both capable of far more than what they were given. Khanna, who apparently signed on without reading the script simply because working with Pawan Kalyan felt like reason enough, ended up in a role that never quite asks enough of her. You notice her. You don’t feel her. That’s a different kind of absence.
The second weekend might still offer some relief. A decent Saturday and Sunday could push the worldwide total past that Rs 100 crore mark, which at this point feels less like a milestone and more like a face-saving threshold. Whether it gets there or not, the real conversation that Ustaad Bhagat Singh has quietly started is a bigger one.
Among Pawan Kalyan’s recent films, this ranks as his lowest five-day collection after Hari Hara Veera Mallu, with They Call Him OG having earned around Rs 147.60 crore in the same window. For someone of his stature, that context matters. It will keep mattering for a while.
The ustaad, this time around, may have run into the one lesson he didn’t script for himself.
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Zayn blends critical thinking with genuine fandom. Whether it’s decoding OTT series arcs or rating the latest Bollywood blockbuster, he writes with clarity, pop fluency, and a dash of irreverence.
