Salman Khan’s film continues to slay on day 16: Tiger Zinda Hai box office collection

Tiger Zinda Hai will almost certainly overtake Sultan’s lifetime collection.: Today, that is Saturday, Tiger Zinda Hai should sail past the lifetime collection of another Salman Khan film, Sultan, that earned Rs 300.45 crore.

Tiger Zinda Hai, the Ali Abbas Zafar directorial starring Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif, has collected Rs 295.27 crore till now and has not shown any sign of ending its theatrical run yet. This is remarkable as it is in its third week and the film is still inviting moviegoers. Well, it is Bhai, after all. Bhai’s fan watch his films multiple times and no matter how good (or bad) the film is, the word-of-mouth is always strong since Bhai is in the film. How could the film be bad with Bhai dispatching the bad guys? The idea is inconceivable.

Today, that is Saturday, Tiger Zinda Hai should sail past the lifetime collection of another Bhai film, Sultan, that earned Rs 300.45 crore as the weekend has begun and there are few competitors to Bhai’s film. Whatever there are, they are either regional or Hollywood, with limited appeal in the populous north Indian Hindi belt. Tiger Zinda Hai is the sequel to 2012’s Ek Tha Tiger that was directed by Kabir Khan and was successful in its own right.

Shubhra Gupta had given an average review of the film. She compared the film’s simplistic depiction of Indian and Pakistani nurses being held hostage by terrorists in Iraq with the Malayalam film, Take Out, which did the same thing more realistically. “The 2016 Malayalam film Take-Off was a terrific re-creation of that very same knife-edge situation, and the bravery-in-the-face-of-certain-death shown by the nurses, spearheaded by Parvathy. Tiger Zinda Hai uses it simply as a peg to get Salman centre-stage, only occasionally deigning to share the screen with Kaif (who has a terrific action sequence all to herself), and his cohorts (Mishra, Bedi and company). A menacing bearded type who goes by the name of Abu Usman (Delfroz) marches about, giving orders to shoot and kill, and the Americans, played by the most inept actors, as usual are the biggest losers,” she had said.

There is something about Salman Khan that the more he tries to act, the more he fails. We saw the dismal results in 2017’s Tubelight. It is better if he maintains the poker face. The study of Salman Khan’s domination of the Hindi film industry will make for a great reading once his career is over. Tiger, for now, is alive and kicking though.