Nowadays, sequels or franchise films are turning out to be major successes at the box office, especially in Bollywood. With the same belief, the Kantara prequel was expected to become a huge hit in the Hindi version. However, Kantara Chapter 1’s Hindi version bombs in North America.
The Pan-Indian movie from Kannada, KGF 2, had collected around $7.4 million in North America a few years back, even in the Covid era. Rishab Shetty’s Kantara Chapter 1’s America business is valued above KGF 2’s closing numbers, but the box office numbers did not match the expectations.
Kantara Chapter 1 fails to beat KGF Chapter 1 because of poor performance in Hindi
The spiritual action drama collected around 4.1 million in 11 days. If we look at language-wise collections, Kantara Chapter 1 did very well in Kannada, even much better than KGF Chapter 2, as the former collected around $1.4M for 11 days, whereas the latter’s Kannada version’s closing is around $800K.
KGF 2’s Telugu version ended at $2.6M, while the prequel of Kantara did around 2M in 11 days. So for the South versions, Rishab Shetty’s film was on par with Yash-Prashanth Neel’s film.
The main difference is the Hindi version, where KGF 2 collected 3.8M, but Kantara Chapter 1 collected around 500K in Hindi in North America for 11 days. Even reaching 1 million in closing looks not possible for the film.
This huge difference made the film a loss venture for business, and no one expected such a disastrous performance from the Hindi version.