Happy Fan Day!  The stupid distributors are being mean and stupid and not letting me go to a sneak preview tonight (like they did for Dilwale and Happy New Year, and even Prem Ratan Dhan Payo!  Come on, man!), so I have to wait until tonight to actually watch it.  But, in the meantime, I’ll be giving reports from the front as it comes in from the Indian websites.  Not reviews (who cares about those, right?), but box office sales.

(also, that header image is Shahrukh in London with his wax statue in Madame Tussaud’s which has been dressed up to look like Gaurav.  Creepy, right?)

Koimoi.com has kindly given us all the numbers.  Most importantly, 3500 screens estimated in India, 650 overseas.  Interestingly, these numbers are about the same as for Dilwale.

On the one hand, Dilwale was a much higher profile and more crowd-pleasing film.  But on the other hand, it was sharing screens with Bajirao, an almost equally big release.  Fan isn’t sharing with anyone, it could take every screen in India and every screen available for Indian films overseas.  But Yash Raj has decided not to do that.

Koimoi also gives the figures for the production costs of Fan.  Best guess is 105 crore, 85 crore for production and 20 crore for prints and publicity.  The Satellite rights alone have already covered most of the cost.

See, this is the key here.  If they wanted to go big, like really really big, on the release and promotion, that could have easily doubled the cost.  Heck, they could have gone a lot bigger on the production too!  Hired an actual name star to support Shahrukh, instead of just leaving him out there by himself.  But, they didn’t.

I think this is a bit of a test.  First, as to the economic viability of an artistic Shahrukh film, rather than a big budget big songs type thing.  And second, as to the viability of a low-budget long running film rather than a big budget wide release one.

I am actually equally excited about both tests!  First, I would love it is Shahrukh returned to more interesting films that stretched his acting talents.  And really, it looks like he has already made that decision, his next 4 films are all more artistically challenging (first Fan, then Raees, than his Gauri Shinde picture, then a movie with Imtiaz Ali).  But if Fan flops massively, I don’t know if he would be able to keep up this path.  He’s got a whole studio, and a whole family, to support!  He might back out of his other commitments, and do a big Raees reshoot, making it more crowd-pleasing.    Which, boo!  I like crowd-pleasing Shahrukh when it is done well, but there aren’t many directors who can do it well, and he hasn’t been picking the best scripts.

Second, there really needs to be a test by a major studio of the viability of low-budget word of mouth hits.  I mean, we should already be able to tell they are more viable!  Neerja and Airlift both made their budgets back after releasing on (comparatively) few screens with minimal promotion.  But then they ran on those few screens for weeks and weeks and weeks, and the free word of mouth publicity kept the box office coming that whole time.

Aditya Chopra has always been on the cutting edge of the industry, with everyone else just trying to catch up.  He’s been doing big releases for a while now, most recently Dhoom 3, but I would love it if Fan is the beginning of a new trend for the studio.  The fact that his next movie, Befikre, is already being talked about as a different, smaller, more intimate movie is a good sign.

(“intimate” was not supposed to be a double entendre.  I just meant, like, a small cast!)