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Box Office Terminators!

They came, they saw and they bulldozed right, left and centre, decimating all competition and rewriting Box-office history of Indian Entertainment. Statistics tumbled like skittles and many a self-styled giants were dwarfed by two men, one 50 and the other 65 years of age.

Of course, it needs no Chinese Arithmetic to decipher that we’re talking about Salman ‘Sultan’ Khan and Rajini ‘Kabali’ Kanth, both ruling the roost now with their latest ventures and today, everybody is just locking horns with everybody else over who owns the exact apex between Sallu Bhai and the Thalaivar (‘Leader’ in Tamil), Rajini.

Well, to get a measure of the two windfalls, Salman’s ‘Sultan’ had 36.5 Crores in its kitty by the end of day-1 while Rajini’s ‘Kabali’ raked in 48 Crore for the same duration. And with respect to the 1st week’s collections, the chart reads 208.82 Crore for ‘Sultan’ and 262 Crore for ‘Kabali’.

But the astounding thing to note here is that the Rajini extravaganza is sledge-hammering the Box-office figures despite being a so-called regional film, whose chief base is Tamil Nadu, where even the Multiplexes cannot exceed ticket rates more than, say, 170 bucks as per the Government ruling, unlike the enormously hiked-up rates of 800 to 1000 bucks per ticket that ‘Sultan’ enjoyed in Northern Multiplexes.

However, the long and short of it is that they both are flying past box-office mileposts in a neck to neck race and even though one may end up a few yards behind the other, or both of them fall short of jockeying ahead of a ‘PK’ or a ‘Bahubali’ in terms of records, the fact remains that both are steamrollers of the utmost power, the likes of which happen only once in a blue moon.

Vierendra Bhargav