The Chennai effect on US Box Office

In India, the broad action comedy “Chennai Express” is known as a “masala” movie – like the mixture of spices, there's a little something for everyone. Today in the box office world, it's a called a hit. “Chennai Express” not only broke records with its $24.5 million opening in India over the weekend, but posted one of the best debuts ever for a Bollywood film in the UK ($1.6 milion) and the highest ever in the United States. It took in more than $2.2 million from just 196 theaters in the US over the three days, giving it a per-screen average better than “Elysium” and “We're the Millers”.
“It was a bit of a surprise for us, too,” Lokesh Dhar, executive director of Disney-owned UTV, which co-produced and is distributing, told TheWrap website. “We knew it would do well, just not this well.”
The film is about a middle-aged man who gets on the wrong train and embarks on a series of life-changing misadventures with the daughter of a village don. Like many Bollywood movies, it features romance, laughs, a bit of violence, dancing and moralising, often played out in wildly colorful scenes.
The plan is to expand “Chennai Express” into a few more theaters this weekend. Its prospects in the US are somewhat limited, since the dialog is in Hindi and Tamil, and subtitled for Americans and foreign countries. “We targeted Southeast Asian audiences almost exclusively,” Dhar said, “but that includes Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis, so it's not a small group.”
The qualities that made it such a hit with those audiences are part of the reason traditional art house crowds weren't the target demo, Dhar explained. “Filmmaking in India is very different and this is a really broad comedy,” he said, “the sort that normally wouldn't be of much interest at the Landmark Theaters.”
It's received fairly good reviews from several US outlets, including the New York Times.
While the language barrier makes a major crossover with mainstream audiences here a long shot, Dhar was cautiously optimistic.
“We aren't ruling anything out,” he said.

Source: INTERNET