What Went Wrong with Bade Miyan Chote Miyan?

With a reported budget of Rs. 350 crore, a multi-star cast that included Akshay Kumar, Tiger Shroff and South superstar Prithviraj Sukumaran, and an endorsement by the king of Eid releases Salman Khan, director Ali Abbas Zafar’s action thriller Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (BMCM, 2024) seemed to be the prime contender to rule the Indian box office this month. On X (previously Twitter), Khan put up this message after the trailer for Bade Miyan Chote Miyan dropped in March: “‘Bade Miyan Chote Miyan’, akki n tiger best of luck for the movie yeh bohut badi hit hogi (This will be a huge hit). Loved the trailer and Ali u need to break tiger n sultan ka record with this one. Umeed hai ke Hindustan ko aap aur aap ko Hindustan Eidi dengein (I hope that it will be a mutual gift shared between you and the country on the occasion of Eid).”

Traditionally, Eid releases are massy entertainers and see a huge footfall of audiences to theatres. Khan has earned his sobriquet by delivering blockbusters like Wanted (2009), Dabangg (2010), Ek Tha Tiger (2012) and Sultan (2016). Among the actor’s few underperforming Eid releases was last year’s Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (2023), which ended up making more than Rs. 100 crore, even though it disappointed both critics and Khan’s fans. 

Not the Eid Film Audiences Wanted

BMCM was tipped to be a chip off Bhai’s block, with its machismo, the flamboyant drama of Zafar’s directorial style, and the dudebro humour between the two leading men. The size, the scale, the mass appeal — it was all there in BMCM. The only competition was Maidaan, a sports drama starring Ajay Devgn and directed by Amit Sharma. “I actually thought BMCM had all the elements. They just didn’t come together in the way that they should have to be able to do what it takes,” said film exhibitor Akshaye Rathi. “You only wish that on a big holiday like Eid with this sort of set-up, the movie fires and sets the box office blazing. That’s unfortunately not what happened.” 

To the Hindi film industry’s shock, BMCM has had a disastrous run at the box office so far. According to data tracker Sacnilk, BMCM recorded an opening day collection of Rs. 15.65 crore, and Maidaan made Rs. 2.6 crore. The numbers would nosedive over the weekend. On the Monday after Eid, BMCM had only the slimmest advantage, with box office collections of approximately Rs. 2.45 crore compared to Maidaan’s Rs. 1.5 crore. Even those known for being forgiving couldn’t find a positive for BMCM. “Considering the huge budget on which it has been made, this film has proven to be a heavy loss for distributors and producers,” said trade analyst Komal Nahta in his review of the film.

In India, Eid has been synonymous with the release of blockbuster films, and the Khans usually got first dibs. After seeing the dismal response for BMCM, there’s been some speculation about whether the film should have picked a different release date. “Eid has largely always been a Khan holiday. To take out Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff on Eid made no sense from a release perspective. There is sort of a mismatch,” said a source close to the actors. 

According to an insider, “The advance bookings of both [BMCM and Maidaan] were terrible and very low for an Eid film. I mean, historically, even on a bad day, an Eid movie opened at Rs. 30 crore. Here, the combined total was not even Rs. 30 crore.” Then there was also the confusion around the date of the release. Everybody went with the assumption that the Eid holiday would be on April 10th. While Maidaan stuck to that date, the team of Bade Miyan Chote Miyan decided to shift the release to April 11th, the day that Eid was declared. The source added, “They could not even shift it fully. There was a paid preview for half of it, and half of it wasn’t a paid preview. You know, that just confuses and confounds people. You tell people that it’s April 10th, it comes out on the 11th, you’re doing a disservice to the audience.”

The Long-Term Impact 

Hits and flops are the tides that film industries navigate on a weekly basis, but the spectacular failure of this year’s Eid releases are likely to impact the Hindi film business in the coming months. “The sustained flow of audiences [that event films bring in] is crucial for the industry’s overall health,” said Sanket Kulkarni, Head of Business Development (Theatrical) at ORMAX Media. “Post pandemic, the likelihood of overall box office growth hinges more on big films outperforming expectations rather than mid-level films achieving unexpected success. Hence, when a potential blockbuster falls short, the opportunity cost is substantial.” Rathi pointed out that the impact of flops like BMCM can also be felt on a creative level: “It discourages a lot of other filmmakers from attempting to enter the arena again. You have an overwhelming number of movies getting cancelled and not going on floor after announcements.”

The box office failure of tentpole films this year has already prompted the industry into making large-scale structural changes, said an industry insider requesting anonymity. “The problem in Indian movies is that they are very front-loaded with actor fees,” they said, pointing out the dependence on star actors. The costs of having a well-known name in the cast ranges from the actual fees — Akshay Kumar reportedly charged in the range of Rs. 165 crore for BMCM — to the entourage that comes with the actor. Maidaan’s credits list details Devgn’s team, which includes two cooks, one chef, two “vanity attendants”, two “gym vanity attendants”, a spot boy, a driver and a personal bodyguard in addition to Devgn’s hair and make-up team. “The industry is making a correction. It has already started for a majority of the actors right now. The fees are getting adjusted as we speak,” insisted one source, adding that they saw a silver lining in the current situation. “You’re going to see a lot of the focus go back into writing or creating content that actually works. That’s a positive impact.”

A standard promotional tactic in the Indian film industry now is to generate word-of-mouth publicity through what is popularly known as “paid reviews”, meaning reviews which are positive because they’ve been commissioned by a film’s PR team. Earlier this year, Film Companion’s editor-in-chief Anupama Chopra wrote a column in the Hindustan Times about the credibility crisis that’s looming in the Indian entertainment landscape as a result of such practices. “When you see a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) or Instagram raving about a film or show, it’s tough to tell if it’s organic or paid for,” she wrote. “My fear is that in the long run, this will stunt storytelling and creativity. Because it’s becoming more and more difficult to discern quality.” 

Rathi believes that the paying audience has become smart to such tactics. “If you see that poster with those usual suspects on them giving four or four-and-a-half stars — people see it like, ‘Okay, this is paid PR, let’s not take this seriously. The movie must be crap.’ It’s reverse psychology at play,” he said, adding that these false reviews actually have a net negative impact on collections and credibility. “All you have to do is go to social media and look at the way the audience runs down these [paid] reviewers. They’re called ‘samosa critics’. It really speaks to how the audience perceives them.” (According to Urban Dictionary, a ‘samosa critic’ is a movie critic “who gets sold out very cheaply for some samosa and cold drink and gives good reviews of worst movies and keeps doing it repeatedly.”) 

Marketing Fails

In hindsight, most of the people Film Companion spoke to about BMCM’s box office performance said that the film’s biggest problem was ineffective marketing. “The promotion strategy started too early,” said an insider who requested anonymity. “The teaser came out just when the movie was announced, which was a bad idea. It was put out in January, which made no sense considering you’re almost four months away from a release, and people don’t have that kind of attention bandwidth.” The timing misfire was compounded by unimpressive promotional material. “I think that the first promo and the first couple of promotional units that came out really didn’t do justice to everything the movie was about,” Rathi continued. “An overwhelming majority of the movie-going audience decides what content they want to watch and where they want to watch it, in cinemas or on television, basis the first trailer that comes out. And the first teaser that had come out almost two months ago, was very underwhelming. I really think that set the tone and damaged the expectations around the film.”

Rathi said that by his estimation, only BMCM’s final theatrical trailer showed “the size, scale, the entertainment quotient of the film.” “And by then, a lot of damage had been done … [Everything] that happened around the film didn’t create the FOMO that a movie requires for a ballistic opening,” said Rathi. With ‘FOMO’ (an acronym for the phrase ‘fear of missing out’), Rathi was referring to the intrigue and curiosity generated by a successful promotional campaign, like Shaitaan (2024) did with its trailer earlier this year. He also pointed out that the audience needs to be wooed. “It’s not just the other films in cinemas, it’s the IPL, it’s the movies and series that are coming out on streaming — there’s so much more in terms of recreational avenues that are at the disposal of the audiences,” he said. “You have to make sure that enough people are excited to want to come scampering over each other for the first day first show — which our marketing machinery has not been able to do, courtesy the vanilla marketing templates that they follow. We have a creative industry and we see some bit of creativity in the content we make, but literally none in our promotions. And that’s sad.”

Insiders also said that the clash between BMCM and Maidaan ended up costing both films. A source close to the BMCM team said, “The whole atmosphere was shameful. When there’s a clash between two actors, the trade and the media tend to play it up and generate a lot of negativity… There was a huge fan war that happened. People should not be wasting their time in a clash to attack somebody else’s home. They should focus on their own campaign.” 

Maidaan also struggled to find its audience. “It’s being viewed as a bit of a dated film,” said Rathi. “I mean, it’s been in the making for the longest time, multiple release dates were announced and missed. So that is something that’s really not done well for the film. And again, the kind of marketing campaign that happened for it, there are enough and more people at the grassroot level who are not even aware of the fact that Maidaan’s releasing in cinemas this Eid.” 

An industry insider said, “A lot of things went wrong with Maidaan. The poster did not work, the first trailer did not work. When you’re creating a movie, you’re generating interest. The idea is to promote your own content. Unfortunately, what happened with the fan clubs and the way the campaign was structured was that it was focused on the clash. They were more concerned about attacking than pushing their own content.”

A source in the trade told Film Companion, “What both films should have done is they should have realised they’re not Eid movies. They should have just quietly opened the movie up on Friday and let that whole thing go through. That extra day of Eid did not do any wonders. It was just bad distribution and a bad call by the production houses this year.”