Bollywoodhungama has the global figures for the weekend!  Woot!  Shockingly (that’s sarcasm), Kabali did great.

Kabali was number 10 over all for America, taking in $3,616,000 on 240 screens, for a remarkable $15,00 per screen average.  It was number 9 in Canada, number 11 in the UK, 35 in Australia, and 44 in Germany.  Did not play in New Zealand, or in Hong Kong (where Bajrangi Bhaijaan is number 30 at the box office on week 8 on only one screen, so pretty impressive!).  Oh, and it’s number one in Malaysia, no duh.

And again, I am mostly fascinated by the South Indian immigration patterns!  Just based on these box office figures, it looks like there is a large population in America and Canada and the UK.  But for some reason, not in Australia or New Zealand.  Huh.

Oh, and Kabali took all the screens away from Sultan, but it looks like Sultan wasn’t really using them anyway.  Last weekend it was on 274 screens and did $2,848 per screen, which is definitely respectable for a second weekend, but not huge.  Opening weekend it did $6,800 per screen, which again is acceptable and respectable for a Khan film, but not huge.  This weekend, it did $2,369 per screen.  Which is very healthy for a 3rd weekend, but was also on only 94 screens, a 3rd as many as it opened on.

Sultan is still doing very very well, don’t get me wrong.  It is rapidly climbing up the all time overseas records.  But a large part of that is simply due to screen count.  The per screen average is about the same as it was for any of the other really big releases this year (Dilwale, Bajirao, Airlift, Neerja, etc.).  It’s just that it came out on a lot more screens.

So really, I want to take a moment and applaud Yash Raj’s distribution wing!  They knocked it out of the park, opening on just enough screens to hit the sweet spot of $7,000 per screen (more than that and it means you left money on the table by not opening on more screens, less than that and it means you spent too much on prints and have saturated the market), and then have nicely dropped it down week by week just enough to keep breaking the $2,000 barrier per screen, making it solidly above average every week.  Very nicely done!

Meanwhile, the Madaari distributors should be ashamed of themselves.  On opening weekend, it made a miserable $1,400 per screen.  Proving that people may come out of theaters saying that “Irrfan Khan was the best part of that film!” but they don’t walk into theaters saying “Give me a ticket for the new Irrfan Khan film!”