Box office: SS Rajamouli's RRR wreaks havoc on opening day

Trust SS Rajamouli to break his own box-office records. The Telugu filmmaker's latest directorial venture RRR: Roudram Ranam Rudhiram (2022) has taken the box office by storm on opening day itself.

The worldwide collection of the epic historical-fiction action drama starring Ram Charan, Jr NTR, Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn, stands at a whopping Rs223 crore, according to trade analyst Taran Adarsh, who tweeted the figure this morning.

According to trade website BoxOfficeIndia.com, the Hindi dubbed version of the film contributed Rs19 crore nett of the grand total.

Given the generally positive reviews and word-of-mouth publicity, there is a good chance this number might rise to Rs30 crore or more over the weekend, setting another record for highest single-day collection by a Hindi dubbed film.

Of the total opening-day collection of Rs223 crore, Rs42 crore came from the USA alone where the film was released on 981 screens. An additional Rs25 crore came from other foreign countries. The numbers are astounding because neither of the film's lead stars has a great following outside the Telugu-speaking states.

RRR, which has been made on a budget of more than Rs300 crore and was sold to distributors for at least Rs520 crore, tells a fictional story set in the pre-Independence era in the 1920s, but the protagonists are based upon two real revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem. While Ram Charan plays Sitarama Raju; NT Rama Rao Jr plays Bheem.

Looking at the opening day collection of RRR, it iseem a foregone conclusion that the film will break the domestic opening-weekend collection record of Rajamouli's previous film Baahubali: The Conclusion (2017), which stands at a staggering Rs300 crore nett.