Samrat Prithviraj box office collection Day 1: Akshay Kumar ‘needs push for a strong weekend’

Manushi Chhillar, Sanjay Dutt, Sonu Sood, Manav Vij, Ashutosh Rana and Sakshi Tanwar also star in this Aditya Chopra production. The film may have opened according to expectations, but it might face some difficulty in maintaining momentum as it is competing against Kamal Haasan’s Vikram.

Film distributor and exhibitor Akshaye Rathi had earlier told indianexpress.com that the film “is expected to open around Rs 10 crore mark. Otherwise, predicting a box office opening at this point in time is like shooting in the dark because nobody could have thought that films featuring some of the top stars like Ajay Devgn, Tiger Shroff, and Shahid Kapoor will open at the kind of numbers that they did.”

The Indian Express film critic Shubhra Gupta gave the film 2 stars and wrote, “What Chandraprakash Dwivedi has done is to soup up the legend so that it is in synch with the dominant national mood: Prithviraj is representative of a Bharat when it was pristine, pure, unpolluted. How did a director who has also made the astonishingly subversive ‘Mohalla Assi’ achieve this switcheroo? (Dwivedi has been on record to say that this is his passion project, and he has been trying to get it off the ground for a decade and more). Or is it just a question of being expedient?”

Dwivedi had earlier said that he lived with the story for 18 years before he made the movie. “Prithviraj is my dream project. It’s a script that I have nurtured for a long, long time because of the extensive research work that was needed before I even attempted to make a film on this mighty and legendary king. To be precise, Prithviraj’s final research took about six months for me to be fully satisfied that every single fact was checked multiple times,” he said.