MUMBAI: In a month that didn’t see the usual flow of big releases, Malayalam film ‘L2 Empuraan’ stood out as a significant multi-language release, and went on to break the record for the highest first-day box office of a Malayalam language film.
This edition of the monthly blog summarises Ormax Cinematix’s box office forecasts (FBO) for all major March 2025 releases vis-Ã -vis their actual box-office openings. Launched in 2010, it is its proprietary campaign tracking and forecasting tool for theatrical film releases in nine major languages, tracking over 750 films every year.
The company said that the above movie’s forecast versus actual box office was within 5% in the two main markets for the film, i.e., Kerala and Karnataka. In other markets too, the deviation was within Rs. 40 lakh of the actual performance.
There were only two major Hindi releases this month, and both released in holiday scenarios. The ‘Diplomat’ released on the Holi festival holiday, while ‘Sikandar’ was a rare Sunday release, and that too in the Ramadan period. Festival releases are difficult to forecast, and Sikandar’s case in particular doesn’t have enough precedences for the FBO Model to learn from.
The film also suffered from an internet leak the day before its release, and also from weak audience word-of-mouth, and fell well short of its Rs. 30+ Crore potential that the holiday offered, given the film’s credentials.
OCX surveys 2,000 theatre-going audiences every week, capturing their engagement with upcoming releases through three key parameters: Buzz, Reach, and Appeal. This data, when combined with market factors such as release scale, ticket price, and holiday release, is used to forecast the first-day box office (domestic) of the tracked films. This parameter, known as serves as the cornerstone of OCX, relied upon by numerous subscribers across languages.
There were only three other major South Indian language releases in March 2025.
Note: Tamil film Veera Dheera Sooran Part-2 had a disrupted release with shows starting only later in the day, and hence has not been considered in this report. There were no major releases with a first-day box office of Rs.1 Crore or more in March 2025, in other languages in which OCX tracks films, i.e., Hollywood, Marathi, Punjabi, and Bengali.
