Mumbai: ‘War 2’ under-performed in Hindi, with negative reviews and audience word-of-mouth impacting its performance on its opening day, leading to a sizeable difference between its forecast and actual performance. While holiday releases are usually immune to negative audience feedback on their first day, and the impact is felt only later, ‘War 2’ released on 14 August, a non-holiday, leading to more significant impact on its first-day performance.
Ormax Cinematix (OCX) is the company’s proprietary campaign tracking and forecasting tool for theatrical film releases in nine major languages, tracking over 750 films every year. The parameter FBO (First-Day Box Office forecast) serves as the cornerstone of OCX, relied upon by numerous subscribers
In October 2024, it started a monthly blog that compares FBO vs. actual performance of all major films released in the month. This post covers major theatrical releases in India in August 2025
‘Coolie’ and ‘War 2’ were the two major releases of the month, with presence across multiple languages and geographies. ‘Coolie’s forecasts were within 15% of actual in the Tamil market, and within 10% for the other markets.
Besides ‘Coolie’ and ‘War 2’, there were three major Hindi and two major Malayalam releases in August 2025, whose forecast versus actual performance can be seen in the chart below. ‘Son Of Sardaar 2’ witnesses a wider deviation of 33%, while the other four films were within 9-13% of their actual first-day box office.
There were no Hollywood, Telugu (original language), Kannada, Marathi or Punjabi releases in August 2025 that collected Rs. 1 Crore or more on their opening day.
