Following a 2023 that saw the Indian box office attain a record tally of Rs 12,226 crore (surpassing 2019’s collection of Rs 10,984 crore), 2024 got off to a solid start with an overall collection of Rs 940 crore in January. Of this, Fighter and Hanu-Man combined to contribute about 67 per cent of the business, as per the India Box Office Report by Ormax Media.

While different language industries use different parameters for assessing box office numbers (Gross, Nett or Share), Ormax’s report adopts Gross Box Office as the unified measurement. Under this, a film’s collection is always attributed to the month of its release, even if the film goes on to produce more or better numbers in the subsequent months. For films released in multiple languages, box office numbers reflect the contribution of such films to all the corresponding languages.

Fighter on top, Hanu-Man in hot pursuit

The pairing of Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone in Fighter, with Anil Kapoor for support, proved to be a winning formula at the box office, as Siddharth Anand’s action-packed film accumulated Rs 244 crore in January. Hot on the heels of Fighter was Telugu superhero film, Hanu-Man, with Teja Sajja as the titular lead. At Rs 241 crore, Hanu-Man finished January in second, well clear of another Telugu hit, a family drama called Guntur Kaaram, which earned Rs 142 crore at the box office.

Fourth and fifth places for the month were sealed by Tamil science-fiction film Ayalaan (at Rs 63 crore) and Tamil epic adventure film Captain Miller starring Dhanush (at Rs 50 crore). Despite critical acclaim, Sriram Raghavan’s Merry Christmas, which stars Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi, could only crawl to eighth place in January with a paltry collection of Rs 22 crore.

2023 will take some beating

Should 2024 continue January’s form for the rest of the year, it will close out the calendar with Rs 11,280 crore, well short of 2023’s record-setting haul. However, with 11 months to go, it is too early to predict how this year will stack up to the last one, especially considering how the box office has a habit of going on a surge of productive months only to peter out when least expected.

In terms of the language share for January, Telugu’s 39 per cent topped the charts, with Hindi at 36 per cent and Tamil a distant third at 16 per cent.