Ek Villain Returns box office collection Day 2: Arjun Kapoor-Disha Patani thriller refuses to back down at ticket counters

#EkVillainReturns collects in similar range on Day 2… Marginal increase at national chains, but down in mass pockets… All eyes on Day 3… Fri 7.05 cr, Sat 7.47 cr. Total: ₹ 14.52 cr. #India biz. pic.twitter.com/eX8jclhsPJ

— taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) July 31, 2022

The 2014 prequel Ek Villain, starring Sidharth Malhotra, Riteish Deshmukh and Shraddha Kapoor had opened with a fairly strong Rs 16.50 crore and ended up crossing the Rs 100 crore mark. The sequel has had to face stiff competition from Sudeep’s Vikrant Rona which has been released as a pan-Indian film. The collections of Sudeep’s film in the Hindi belt dropped when it clashed against the Mohit Suri film.

The Indian Express’s Shubhra Gupta said that Ek Villain Returns’ plot was ‘disjointed’, and gave the film one star, calling it a new low.  She wrote, “Eight years after the original comes the sequel, ‘Ek Villain Returns’, in which the theme, ‘every story has a villain’ gets a refresh. This time around, the story expands its base with two male characters ricocheting between being hero and villain, one masked, another struggling to find his real face. There could have been something to this idea, that everyone has elements of hero and villain within and the one that comes up top depends upon our circumstances. But a disjointed plot and pedestrian performances do not an effective film make.”