Toxic tanks

The Yash-starrer truly disappoints

Meena Iyer

High on style and low on substance, the pan-India superstar Yash’s film Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown Ups failed.  The film that opened to `90 cr on day one in Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu and Tamil, showed 99.9 per cent of our Bollywood superstars in poor light. Why? Because, even Yash’s flop got better collections than some of the biggest Hindi superstars can manage. The exception to the rule is Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar: The Revenge (2026) starring Ranveer Singh, which got a first day collection of `102.55 cr in the domestic market.

Coming back to Toxic, things went south for this film from day two. And after five days, the collections stood at around `193.58 cr across all languages. Mega-bucks, rumoured to be north of `350 cr were riding on this Geetu Mohandas directorial. Everything associated with it during the promotion-drive screamed excessively. Except, the collections, which went out with a whimper. Geetu and Yash were too indulgent. With a running time of 3 hrs 14 mins, the film just went into a narcissistic - “we love ourselves” ego-trip, which the audience rejected.

Emraan Hashmi’s Awarapan 2 also slowed down, touching around `143 cr in 17 days. This film still qualifies as a super hit because of the return on investment. Made at a budget of around `45 cr without Emraan’s price being factored in, Vishesh Bhatt made a killing. We are guessing Emraan had a stake in the IPR too, so he too would have taken home a big pay cheque.

Insidious: Out of the Further collected `16.54 cr in 10 days. Horror is a genre that has been consistently delivering at the global box office and in India. There was a windfall for a mythological film Hanuman Ansh which after four weeks picked up collections based on positive word of mouth. The film got `40.13 cr from the ticket windows adding credence to the saying that where there is faith, there’s money.

Toxic that sold glamour and guns lost in a way to Hanuman Ansh that sold faith.