The Bengal Files box office opens modestly with Rs100 million but fails to match The Kashmir Files success

Dubai: The final chapter in Vivek Agnihotri’s spiritually linked trilogy, The Bengal Files, has posted modest numbers at the box office in India.

While it has already outperformed The Tashkent Files (2019), it is nowhere close to the runaway success of The Kashmir Files (2022).

In its first six days since release on September 5, the political drama has grossed Rs100 million.

On Wednesday, the film recorded its lowest single-day earnings yet at Rs10 million, dipping from Tuesday’s Rs10.35 million. That was a slight bump over Monday’s Rs10.15 million, which had already dropped sharply from Sunday’s Rs20 million, according to industry tracker Sacnilk.

By contrast, The Kashmir Files earned over Rs790 million in its first six days. Still, The Bengal Files has already matched the three-week total of The Tashkent Files and is close to surpassing the lifetime domestic collection of Agnihotri’s last release, The Vaccine War (2023), which stood at Rs100 million.

Adding to its box office struggles, the film also faced a legal challenge. Earlier this week, the Calcutta High Court dismissed a petition filed by Santanu Mukherjee, grandson of freedom fighter Gopal Chandra Mukherjee. He alleged the movie depicted his grandfather in a derogatory light, referring to him as “Patha” (goat) and wrongly linking him to the violence of August 16, 1946, known as the Great Calcutta Killings.

The petitioner argued that the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) had failed to respond to his RTI query about the portrayal. However, CBFC’s counsel pointed out that no timely appeal was filed and the film had already been released nationwide, making the plea infructuous. The court advised him to pursue remedies under the RTI Act.

Featuring Mithun Chakraborty, Anupam Kher, Pallavi Joshi, Saswata Chatterjee, Darshan Kumarr and Sourav Das, The Bengal Files released alongside Baaghi 4 and The Conjuring: Last Rites. By its seventh day, it is expected to surpass The Vaccine War’s lifetime earnings.