Mowgli & Co becomes highest Hollywood grosser in India

The Jungle Book enters the Rs 150-crore club of box office collections in the country, beats SRK's Fan and Akshay Kumar's Airlift

Mowgli and his friends have roared their way to box office history in India.

Director Jon Favreau’s vision of Rudyard Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book has become the first film to cross the Rs 150-crore mark in box office collections. Released in India on April 8, a week before it hit the cinemas in the US, the blockbuster has also beaten Bollywood releases such as Akshay Kumar-starrer Airlift and Shah Rukh Khan’s Fan.

Read more from our special coverage on "JUNGLE BOOK"

• The Jungle Book crosses Rs 100 crore mark
• Why Hollywood is releasing films in foreign markets before the US

The Hollywood film has beaten the combined collections of two of the most successful Indian films this year — Neerja (Rs 75.6 crore) and Kapoor & Sons (Rs 73 crore).

It has also beaten Airlift (Rs 127 crore) and is giving Fan a run for its money.

While the animation adventure of a boy raised by the wolves is starkly a different genre from the thriller on an obsessed fan, a big SRK release should have hit the collections of the former.

But, according to analysts, strong word-of-mouth promotion has helped The Jungle Book.

“It remained strong in its third week, setting new benchmarks,” said Suniel Wadhwa, an independent distributor and box office analyst.

He said: “The film collected Rs 150 crore in 20 days. Before this, the highest box office grossers from Hollywood was Furious 7 (2015), which collected Rs 106 crore. It seems heading to a lifetime collection of Rs 175 crore in India.”

Disney, the producer of the film, has engaged in aggressive marketing. The film was released in four languages (English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu), across 1,700-1,800 screens, in 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D.

The producers also focused on the Hindi dubbing, getting big Bollywood names such as Priyanka Chopra as Ka, the snake, Om Puri as Bagheera and Irrfan Khan as Baloo.

The move has proved profitable, with almost 60 per cent of the collections coming from the Indian language dubs.

“The Jungle Book has not only created new a box office benchmark in India but has also been such a loved movie across age groups and across languages. We are so proud of the India performance. We are one of the top four highest performing markets internationally for the movie,” said Amrita Pandey, vice-president, studio, Disney India.

Globally, the film has collected $563 million, according to the box office tracking website boxofficemojo.com. The reported cost of making the film was $175 million.

Industry insiders claim Disney’s strategy of owning the content and localising the marketing has hit the bull’s eye.

“Of course, a story like The Jungle Book lends itself very well to localisation, but to get the voice cast the studio did and the way the film was marketed and the fact that it released in India before anywhere in the world, has definitely helped,” said a film studio executive.

“In the past, films like Avatar, Life of Pi and Slumdog Millionaire, all with strong Indian references, have done well in the country. But Disney’s treatment of The Jungle Book has set it apart. Also, the number audiences opting to watch Hollywood films has increased in the past couple of years, even if it’s the Hindi or regional dubs that are more popular,” said another executive.

With Fox’s Deadpool surprising everyone with its performance in February, Hollywood seems to be poised to have a landmark year in India.

Titles yet to be released this year include Captain America: Civil War,  X-Men: Apolcalypse, Angry Birds, and Inferno.