Naga Vamsi’s Sitara Entertainments production Lucky Bhaskar had paid premieres in India before the usual U.S. premieres started, and the kind of talk that emerged along with high ratings from websites was like a dream come true for any movie team.
In fact, the last time a film generated this much positive buzz online was in March 2024, but that film had its own advantages; coincidentally, it was also from the same production house.
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Everyone in the U.S. distribution circle or the trade folks in Telugu states are clueless about Lucky Bhaskar’s underperformance ($685K in 5 days), especially after all that extreme positive noise from the premieres in the Telugu states.
Some might say it could be a class film, but then it should perform exceptionally well in metro areas and in the U.S., which did not happen.
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Here, we put together some theories that might make sense—read on…
Firstly, we think the casting is a factor. While there is no denying that Dulquer Salmaan has gained positivity among Telugu audiences, he has yet to become a force to pull audiences to theaters.
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Lucky Bhaskar is his second Telugu project after Sita Ramam, which had many other factors like songs, Mrunal Thakur, etc. But for Lucky Bhaskar, there is no additional padding for him. Even though Venky Atluri is a Telugu director, he is not a brand name that excites audiences enough to draw them to theaters. The genre of Lucky Baskhar is also set against a financial backdrop, but it’s not a widely popular genre.
Some might point to multiple releases clashing with other films also getting decent or positive talk as a reason for the underperformance.
This is also a weak excuse because, while Amaran worked big and collected around one million, the Telugu version of Amaran only collected $37K, indicating that not many Telugu people skipped Lucky Bhaskar to watch the Telugu version of Amaran.
KA is not a universal genre to suggest that if KA hadn’t clashed with Lucky Bhaskar, all its collections would have gone to Lucky Bhaskar.
KA collected only $420K. A percentage of students in the U.S. would have watched both Lucky Bhaskar and KA. We should also agree that some of the audience would have skipped Lucky Bhaskar to watch KA, and a section of thriller fans who watched KA wouldn’t have watched Lucky Bhaskar anyway because this section watched KA because its a thriller.
Therefore, the impact of KA is also negligible, given its limited appeal based on genre and also cast.
In any case, when you look at Lucky Bhaskar’s first weekend collection of $685K, you can see it has underperformed.
Also, Lucky Bhaskar had a large number of paid premieres in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and the talk emerged 6-8 hours before U.S. premieres started. However, the impact from the Indian premieres on the U.S. premieres was literally zero.
No one in the U.S. was influenced by all the noise that producer Naga Vamsi made on ‘X’ using Martin Scorsese’s meme, despite him being a name and brand himself. We are sure this will remain a big puzzle for their team after Lucky Bhaskar collected $80K from its premieres, which is almost nothing these days for a premiere day.
There are many other miscellaneous factors that could be speculated on, starting from the title itself. Lucky Bhaskar title sounds like a not-so-interesting prospect that warrants a visit to theaters. When you have written a character like Bhaskar, the title could have been more striking rather than just adding ‘Lucky.’ which gives an easy vibe.
Regarding songs: when you have a lead like Dulquer Salmaan, you need at least one chartbuster song that penetrates the film into the public view. In this case, it’s a big miss. Just to clarify, Bhaskar has certain traits, but neither the title nor the title song made any impact.
In short, we should say there is no straightforward single answer for Lucky Bhaskar’s underperformance. However, the makers’ overestimation of the lead cast and the story theme, which has limited appeal, could be the primary reason, followed by several others discussed above.
