‘Dunki’ Box Office Collection Day 16: Rajkumar Hirani’s Film Becomes Shah Rukh Khan’s Third-Biggest All-Time Hit

Shah Rukh Khan‘s ‘Dunki’ released in theaters on December 21, and it has been a fortnight since its release. Nonetheless, the Rajkumar Hirani film has been faring decently at the box office. 

Now, as per industry tracking website Sacnilk, the film’s box office on Friday (January 5) was Rs 2.20 crore, with its total India nett earnings to Rs 208.67 crore. The film’s production house, Red Chillies Entertainment, confirmed that director Rajkumar Hirani’s film earned Rs 422.99 crore at the global box office. With the latest numbers, the film will overtake lifetime collections of ‘Chennai Express’, which were Rs 423 crore on January 6 to become the third-biggest hit of SRK’s career. The film remains only behind ‘Jawan’ and ‘Pathaan’, and interestingly, all three of these films were released in 2023.

The film, which also stars Taapsee Pannu and Vicky Kaushal, has been holding well at the box office. However, it has not been able to match the lifetime box office performance of Hirani’s earlier films, including the Ranbir Kapoor-starrer ‘Sanju’, which made Rs Rs 588 crore worldwide in 2017, and Aamir Khan’s ‘PK’ (2014, which was a huge success with a gross was Rs 769.89 crore.

Well, for now, it seems crossing the Rs 500 crore mark at the global box office might be a far-fetched idea for ‘Dunki’, considering it would face competition from two other big films releasing this month — Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi’s ‘Merry Christmas’ (releasing on January 12) and Deepika Padukone and Hrithik Roshan’s ‘Fighter’ (releasing on January 25). The last Rajkumar Hirani film to earn less than Rs 500 crore worldwide is ‘3 Idiots’, which was released in 2009.

As for SRK, he has been grabbing all the attention with his comeback to the big screen, and 2023 was the year for him. He starred in two of the biggest earning films in the history of Hindi films — ‘Pathaan’ and ‘Jawan’. Meanwhile, after ‘Dunki’, he has not announced his next project. 

Meanwhile, drawn from real-life experiences, ‘Dunki’ is a saga of love and friendship that brings together five wildly disparate stories.  A Jio Studios, Red Chillies Entertainment, and Rajkumar Hirani Films production, the film is both directed and co-produced by Rajkumar Hirani alongside Gauri Khan. It is written by Abhijat Joshi, Rajkumar Hirani and Kanika Dhillon