Bollywood gears up for a big blast at the box office this Independence Day. Unlike last year, this year it’s going to be a three-way clash between Shraddha Kapoor’s Stree 2, Akshay Kumar’s Khel Khel Mein, and John Abraham’s Vedaa. At present, the Stree sequel seems to be an easy winner, with the advance booking report for day 1 strongly supporting the claim. It proved its strong hype by crossing the mark of 50,000 tickets in a period of less than one and a half days.
Directed by Amar Kaushik, the horror comedy is a sequel to 2018’s blockbuster, Stree. It also serves as the fifth installment in Maddock Supernatural Universe. Apart from Shraddha, the film also features Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, Abhishek Banerjee, and Aparshakti Khurana in key roles. As its predecessor was a huge critical and commercial success, the sequel factor is working big time and helping to sell tickets like hotcakes.
The advance booking for Stree 2 commenced the night before yesterday, and in a span of one and a half days, the film sold over 50,000 tickets. Such a response reflects genuine interest on the ground level. It is further learned that the Stree sequel has amassed 1.80 crores gross (excluding blocked seats) through day 1 advance booking (as of 9:00 am). If it continues to go at this pace, the mark of 10 crores gross would be crossed as there are still 4 days to go.
Despite a three-way clash, Stree 2 is going to register the highest opening day pre-sales for Bollywood in 2024 by surpassing Fighter’s 8.60 crores gross. Also, the film is very much on track to beat Fighter‘s day 1 collection of 24.60 crores to be the biggest Bollywood opener of the year.
Meanwhile, the first installment was released back in 2018. It took a start of 6.83 crores, and with positive word-of-mouth coming into play, the film managed to hit the lifetime collection of 129.67 crores net at the Indian box office.