Box Office Review - ABCD & Special 26

Define Friday in Bollywood? Simple, it's a mixture of expectation and anticipation. While the audience goes to the theaters with the expectation of being entertained, the film makers anticipate the outcome of their months of hard work and the money they've poured in. Last Friday, the theaters opened to two big films - Akshay Kumar starrer Special 26 and ace choreographer Remo Dsouza's 3D dance venture, ABCD - Any Body Can Dance.

Special 26 opened to a much larger number of screens owing to the star power of Akshay Kumar, Anupam Kher and Manoj Bajpai. It is the second movie directed by the maker of the critically acclaimed A Wednesday, which not only had the critics applauding it wholeheartedly but it was also declared a sleeper hit at the Box Office. Special 26 is a heist drama set in the 1980s, and like most movies of this genre, it depended highly on the positive feedback of the critics and the good word of mouth tactic. The film started off slow but since it is completely script-backed and the performances are stellar, the result was generally positive and business continued to grow on the days succeeding the release date. Over the weekend, the film managed to earn 27 crores and from the looks of it, the flick will continue to grow owing to the deciding factor - good worth of mouth - is already at its side.

ABCD aka Any Body Can Dance had a comparatively smaller release but the occupancy rate of seats was much higher than that of Special 26. ABCD, like Special 26, is also the second directorial venture of the acclaimed choreographer Remo D'Souza and it stars the dancing legend Prabhu Deva among an ensemble of other celebrated dancers of the country. It is the first 3D movie in the genre of dance and is primarily targeted towards the youth. Critics are all praise for this movie and the audience has already termed it as a paisa vasool entertainer. Business continued to grow and it managed to mint 20 crores over the weekend.

Judging by the numbers, it is safe to assume that both movies will be declared a hit at the BO soon. But if the scale of release is taken in account as well as the star power of both the movies, ABCD seems like the bigger success of the two. Nonetheless, both the movies fulfill the promise of entertaining albeit being in different genres hence giving both of them a safe BO bet.