The aerial actioner Tejas, headlined by Kangana Ranaut in the titular role of the Indian Air Force officer Tejas Gill, is among the biggest Bollywood flops this year after Adipurush, Ganapath, Yaariyan 2, and The Vaccine War. On its fourth day of release, the film collected only Rs 40 lakh, taking its four-day net domestic total to Rs 4.15 crore.
Multiple theatre owners cancelled the shows of Kangana Ranaut's latest film in its opening week itself and have decided to remove Tejas screenings from Monday onwards. This is despite the fact that multiple National Award-winning actress, in a desperate attempt, requested people to go watch her film in theatres.
The entertainment portal Bollywood Hungama got in touch with several theatre owners across India. Kirtibhai T Vaghasia, who runs The Friday Cinema multiplex in Surat, shared that he had to cancel all the 15 shows of Tejas in his cinema hall from Friday to Sunday. "Not a single show of Tejas has been played in my theatre. There were zero bookings. On Friday, I gave one whole audi to Tejas and decided to play 6 shows as it’s just 2 hours long. But due to no audience, I decided to play 3 shows of Tejas on Saturday", he said.
Kirtibhai further added, "We have a policy that we play a show only if there are 10 patrons. With Tejas, we thought at least 4-5 viewers might turn up at least for some show. Even that didn’t happen. The same scenario has been repeated on Sunday as well. No one has come to even enquire about Tejas. Can you believe it?", and concluded that he has replaced Tejas' shows with Vijay-starrer Leo in his theatre.
Manoj Desai, who runs the popular G7 Multiplex in Mumbai, also told the portal, "On Sunday, we managed to get 100 viewers. For the rest of the shows, the number of moviegoers was less than 100." Vishek Chauhan, who owns Roopbani Cinema in Bihar, declared Tejas "unmitigated disaster", as he stated, "Tejas is an unmitigated disaster. For the first time this year, the morning show in my theatre got cancelled because of zero ticket sales. Hardly 20-30 people were there in the rest of the shows."Helmed by Sarvesh Mewara in his directorial debut and bankrolled by Ronnie Screwvala under his banner RSVP Movies, Tejas also stars Anshul Chauhan, Varun Mitra, Ashish Vidyarthi, and Vishak Nair in key roles.
Kajal Agarwal