Salman and Akshay have furious competition

It is going to be feast at the marquee next Eid in 2020 when the Hollywood box office juggernaut franchise Fast and the Furious 9 chugs into India to release on May 22.

That is the very time when two big stars from Bollywood the Eid specialist Salman Khan and by then Indian citizen Akshay Kumar will clash at the box office with their respective films India’s Most Wanted Cop: Radhe and Laxmmi Bomb respectively.

While Radhe and Laxmmi Bomb will be carpet bombing the theatres with multiple screens Fast And Furious 9 drives into Indian theatres in the very big way powered by Vin Diesel.

This will mean that there will be a huge fight for who manages to grab the most screens. The seventh and the eight editions of the film steamrollered their Indian opposition mercilessly and hence the distributors of these films have also turned quite wary though there are no doubts about the efficacy of Salman and Akshay in the Indian market.

While Fast and Furious 7 thrashed Byomkesh Bakshy starring Sushant Singh Rajput for Yash Raj Films, Fate of the Furious – the eighth part decided the fate of the Vidya Balan starrer Begum Jaan for Mahesh and Mukesh Bhatt.

And this basically means that the films will certainly cannibalise into each other.

“When two big films are releasing there is an expected loss of 15 percent in revenue, because of the growth of multiplexes and the availability of screens these days. It was much higher earlier. But if there are three big films like what we see now, it will be tough for all films to get the best collections,” says Atul Mohan, editor Complete Cinema.

The fact that Salman Khan’s Bharat was just above par this year during his favourite release time- Eid after two bad performances in 2017 and 2018 in the form of Tubelight and Race 3, means that he would have a lot at stake. Add to that the fact that his staple cop drama Dabangg 3 also releases later this month. “A lot will depend on what happens with the collections of Dabangg 3,” adds Mohan.

“Even Radhe is a cop film and Akshay’s Sooryavanshi where he plays a cop will be out in March and then there is Akshay bang opposite Salman. Vin Diesel is no pushover as well in the series whose last film Fate of the Furious collected over Rs 100 crores in gross collections at the Indian box office and that would mean that the younger generation feeding on a staple diet of Hollywood flicks may well desert the Bollywood films for a Hollywood one,” says another trade analyst.

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