Akshay Kumar reacts to Salman Khan’s ‘Rs 1000 crore new box office benchmark’ comment: ‘Don’t pressurise a film’

Akshay Kumar, on the sidelines of the Mission Raniganj promotions, emphasised on the need to stop measuring the success of films based on their box office success. Recently Salman Khan had commented that with the success of Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan and Sunny Deol’s Gadar 2, the “Rs 100 crore club is not going to be a very big deal.” Akshay said, “Don’t pressurise a film by thinking that this film will do that business, let’s not just look at the commercial aspect of the film, some stories need to be told over and above that.”

Reacting to Salman’s remarks, Akshay has said that he hopes Bollywood churns out more hits like Jawan and Gadar 2. Akshay said, “I hope the industry gives more and more hits. I was very happy when Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan did so much good business. There are many other films like Gadar (2), OMG 2 which also did well. So it is very good for the industry. Our industry went through a very bad patch during the Covid times, now things are moving and it is a great thing that Rs 1000 crore is a benchmark. Also hope that we make Rs 2000-3000 crore films like Hollywood, because the kind of cinema, the screenplay, the script that we have they don’t have.”

Akshay then shared that Mission Raniganj is not a commercial film. He said, “Commercial success is important because you have to make other films, but it also depends on what kind of commercial success you will get. Talking about Mission Raniganj, this film is made on a certain budget, I won’t call it a commercial film, it is not a Jawan or a Rowdy Rathore, it is not that kind of film, it has a niche audience but I hope it does good business.”

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Akshay, at the press interaction, was then asked why the film’s team decided to change the tag line of Mission Raniganj from ‘The Great India Rescue’ to ‘The Great Bharat Rescue’. He responded by saying, “Is Bharat a wrong name? India is also not wrong, it is perfectly right. We did it (changed the tagline) because it is a great name, it is in our constitution, so we changed it.”

Mission Raniganj, also starring Parineeti Chopra, Ravi Kishan, Pawan Malhotra among others, is directed by Tinu Suresh Desai. This is their second collaboration after Rustom (2016).