Sultan movie. Review on Sultan

Salman Khan

Good use of Salman Khan

Savvy release strategy

For Salman Khan, that’s just a fact, any movie staring Salman(or Aamir or Shahrukh) will have a massive opening day box office. People come in for their name alone. Even Fan, which people HATED, made 19 crore on its opening day just because of Shahrukh’s name.

But for a Khan film to sustain that box office, it has to make good use of its star. Fan, again, started dropping like a stone in the very first weekend because people didn’t like what it did to the Shahrukh Khan brand. But Sultan uses Salman very well. It gives him the kind of innocent but powerful character he can play very well, and which his fans like. So it did well both with repeat business from his fans, and with word of mouth business from people who heard it was better than the “usual” Salman film.

Finally, and this can’t be discounted, it had a very good release strategy. I give the exact figures on my blog Box Office: Kabali Does Great(no duh), and Sultan Avoids Saturating the Market

But the short version is, it released on just enough screens to get the optimal box office opening weekend, and then has slowly been decreasing its screen count just enough to keep getting optimal box office without losing money on screen rentals for the past few weeks. Apparently Yash Raj has a two-tier release strategy, meaning all those prints that are slowly leaving America and other countries, will be sent to China and South America in a second release. Thereby spreading out the profits globally, without spending more money upfront on prints.