After a fair weekend run, Sidharth Malhotra and Janhvi Kapoor’s romantic comedy Param Sundari faced a setback at the box office on its first Monday. The film, which managed ₹26.75 crore across its opening weekend, recorded a significant dip in earnings, pulling in only ₹3.25 crore on Monday compared to Sunday’s ₹10.25 crore.
The drop was also reflected in theatre occupancy levels. Bengaluru led the chart with 17.25%, followed by Chennai (15.50%), Mumbai (13.25%), and the National Capital Region (11%). Among show timings, afternoon screenings performed best with 11.97% occupancy, trailed by night shows (11.42%) and evening shows (10.73%). Morning shows, as expected on a working day, recorded the lowest turnout at 8.57%.
Directed by Tushar Jalota, the rom-com also features Sanjay Kapoor, Renji Panicker, Manjot Singh, with a special cameo by Abhishek Banerjee.
In our review, we noted that Param Sundari plays out as a classic Bollywood boy-meets-girl story with a familiar social hurdle. The narrative feels like a budget version of DDLJ, trading Swiss landscapes for scenic Kerala backdrops. Interestingly, while the film pokes fun at stereotyping the South, its own visual grammar often blurs the cultural nuances, making a Kerala hamlet look no different from a Tamil Nadu village.
For viewers in the Hindi belt, who have long embraced dubbed South Indian films even before the “Pan-India” wave, Param Sundari comes across as an amusing but uneven attempt to bridge cultures while staying firmly in Bollywood’s rom-com template.
