Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge — How Aditya Dhar’s Spy Epic Rewrote Indian Box Office History

The Numbers Are Not Normal

Forty-eight days into its theatrical run, Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge is still selling between 20,000 and 65,000 tickets a day on BookMyShow alone. Six weeks in, most films are wrapping up their last stray shows in a handful of screens. This one is still peaking at 65,000 bookings on a Saturday. That is not a box office run. That is a cultural event that simply refused to end.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge grossed over Rs 1,837 crore worldwide, becoming the second-highest-grossing Indian film of all time. It collected Rs 1,361 crore in India and Rs 475.93 crore in overseas markets — without releasing in GCC countries and China. That last point matters more than it might seem. Since China is not a regular market for most Indian releases, many analysts treat its contribution to Dangal's total as a separate case. Dhurandhar 2 achieved what it did on its own, in open markets, without either of the two biggest supplementary territories available to Indian cinema.

What the Film Is

In the film, an undercover Indian intelligence agent continues infiltrating Karachi's criminal syndicates and political power structures in Pakistan while avenging the 26/11 attacks and confronting bigger threats. It is a direct sequel to the 2025 film Dhurandhar, which introduced the character and the world. Shot back-to-back alongside the first part, principal photography began in July 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand, and wrapped in October 2025. Filming took place across Punjab, Chandigarh, Maharashtra, Ladakh, and Himachal Pradesh in India, and Thailand, with some areas doubling for Pakistan-set sequences.

The film is directed by Aditya Dhar and produced by Jio Studios and B62 Studios, and stars Ranveer Singh, Sara Arjun, Akshaye Khanna, Sanjay Dutt, Arjun Rampal, R. Madhavan, Danish Pandor, Yami Gautam, and Rakesh Bedi.

The Opening: Records Before the Weekend Even Started

The film grossed Rs 75 crore from paid previews on March 18, 2026, a day before the official release, breaking the previous Indian record held by Stree 2. That single number announced the scale of what was coming.

The film earned Rs 130-174 crore on its opening day on March 19, 2026, and Rs 196-240 crore worldwide including the previous day's premieres. This marked the highest opening day for a Bollywood film, surpassing Adipurush. The film became the first Indian film to earn more than Rs 100 crore in a single day of Hindi net collections.

By the end of its opening weekend, the film had earned Rs 759.91 crore worldwide, with overseas earnings of around Rs 209.60 crore. The global opening weekend gross was over USD 80 million, only behind Project Hail Mary. An Indian film outgrossed by a single Hollywood release globally in opening weekend terms — and that Hollywood release happened to be one of the most anticipated sci-fi films in years. That is the company Dhurandhar 2 kept in its very first week.

Dhurandhar 2 crossed Rs 1,006 crore worldwide in its first week. One thousand crore in seven days. Only a handful of Indian films have ever done it in their lifetime. This one did it before the second Friday.

The Records That Followed, One After Another

The film earned USD 20.80 million in North America within nine days, surpassing Baahubali 2: The Conclusion's USD 20.78 million lifetime record in the region. It became the highest-grossing Indian film in Australia.

On April 5, 2026, the film became the first Indian film to cross USD 25 million in North America and the highest-grossing Indian film in Germany.

On April 6, it became the first Hindi film to cross Rs 1,000 crore net collections in India across all languages. By April 8, it became the first Indian film to cross Rs 1,000 crore in Hindi net collections alone, making it the highest-grossing Indian film in Hindi net domestically.

By the end of its fourth weekend, the film crossed Rs 1,700 crore worldwide. In its fifth week of release, it became the highest-grossing Indian film in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

As of May 3, with a total worldwide collection of Rs 1,783.66 crore — comprising Rs 1,358.51 crore in India gross and Rs 425.15 crore from overseas — Dhurandhar 2 was within Rs 5 crore of the lifetime worldwide collection of Baahubali 2. It has since crossed that figure, becoming the second-highest-grossing Indian film of all time.

The Franchise Dimension: A Once-in-a-Generation Back-to-Back

What makes the Dhurandhar story even more remarkable is what the first film did. The first part earned Rs 894.49 crore net in India, becoming the highest grosser of 2025. The sequel repeated the same milestone in 2026 with a net collection of Rs 1,175.73 crore.

Both Dhurandhar and Dhurandhar 2 became the biggest blockbusters Hindi cinema has ever seen in back-to-back years — a rare milestone to become the highest-grossing franchise of each year consecutively.

The combined worldwide gross of the Dhurandhar duology surpassed Rs 3,000 crore, earning it the title of the highest-grossing Indian film franchise. Not the highest-grossing franchise this year. All time. The Dhurandhar franchise has, in two films, crossed a number that no other series in Indian cinema history has reached.

The first part, Dhurandhar, currently occupies the fifth spot on the all-time global Indian box office charts with a lifetime collection of Rs 1,307.35 crore. The Dhurandhar franchise now holds two distinct spots in the top five highest-grossing Indian films of all time. Both spots were earned in consecutive years, by the same director, with the same lead actor.

The Longevity: A Film That Would Not Let Go

What separates genuine blockbusters from opening-weekend phenomena is how they hold. Dhurandhar 2 held.

In its sixth week, Dhurandhar 2 collected Rs 12.40 crore in India, placing it fourth on the all-time highest sixth-week collection list behind the original Dhurandhar (Rs 26.35 crore), Stree 2 (Rs 18.60 crore), and Chhaava (Rs 16.30 crore). Sitting in the same sentence as Stree 2 and Chhaava in sixth-week performance tells you everything about the kind of audience loyalty this film generated.

Even in its sixth week, daily ticket sales on BookMyShow stayed in a solid range between 20,000 and 65,000 tickets, with a clear peak on Saturday at nearly 65,000 bookings. Daily collections in the sixth week do not behave like that unless word-of-mouth has been compounding for weeks and families are still actively choosing this film over newer releases.

The net collection of Rs 1,135.04 crore came across over 5 lakh shows. Five lakh shows. That is the footprint of a film that had genuine nationwide reach and kept it.

The Context: Why Beating Baahubali 2 Is What It Is

For nearly a decade, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion was the untouchable number for Indian cinema. S. S. Rajamouli's magnum opus did not just make money — it changed the conversation about what Indian films could aspire to at the global box office. Its Rs 1,788 crore lifetime total became the benchmark by which every subsequent large-scale Indian release was measured and found wanting.

For years, Baahubali 2, starring Prabhas, was considered an almost untouchable benchmark in Indian cinema. Its global dominance symbolised the scale and reach of Indian films. Dhurandhar 2 has now managed to edge past that milestone, signalling a new era for Bollywood at the worldwide box office.

The nature of the comparison also matters. Dhurandhar 2 achieved this without a China release and without a GCC release, unlike Dangal. Among Indian films excluding Gulf and China markets, Dhurandhar 2's position is even clearer. Dangal's position at the top of the all-time list rests heavily on its extraordinary China run, which contributed over Rs 1,300 crore of its total by itself. Dhurandhar 2 got there through open markets alone.

The Overseas Story: Bollywood Globalising on Its Own Terms

Dhurandhar: The Revenge collected Rs 475.93 crore in overseas markets without releasing in GCC countries and China. Nearly Rs 476 crore from international markets that represent a fraction of the total addressable audience for Indian cinema — that is a number that reflects genuine diaspora and crossover engagement, not just the Indian community watching in foreign cities.

The film earned USD 20.80 million in North America within nine days, surpassing Baahubali 2's USD 20.78 million lifetime record in the region. It became the highest-grossing Indian film in Australia, the UK, and New Zealand in its fifth week. These are markets with established Hollywood competition and sophisticated multiplex audiences. Holding those markets for five weeks is not a standard achievement.

The Reviews: A Film That Divided Critics but Not Audiences

The film received mixed reviews, with praise for its performances, storytelling, soundtrack, and technical aspects, and criticism for its levels of violence and for containing alleged nationalist propaganda. Like its predecessor, it was banned in all Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

One critic, Sakshi Salil Chavan of Outlook, gave 2 out of 5 stars, writing that the film "leans heavily into gore, violence and strong pro-government messaging" but "falls short of recreating the rich worldbuilding that defined the first film."

The gap between critical reception and audience behaviour is one of the more interesting phenomena of Dhurandhar 2's run. Whatever reservations the reviewing community held, the ticket-buying public answered those reservations with the most unambiguous possible response: Rs 1,837 crore and counting.

What Comes Next for the Franchise

It has been officially confirmed that the first part, Dhurandhar, will release in Japan on July 10, 2026. The Japanese market has a history of turning Indian blockbusters into legends, with RRR remaining the only Indian film to breach the Rs 2 billion milestone there. The Japan release of the first part is designed to build an audience ahead of Dhurandhar 2's eventual Japanese run, giving the franchise a sequential entry into a market that has historically rewarded Indian action-spectacle with deep loyalty.

Whether a third film in the franchise is in development has not been officially confirmed. What has been confirmed, by every number the box office has produced over the past 48 days, is that Aditya Dhar and Ranveer Singh have built something that Indian cinema has not seen before: a spy franchise that rivals not just its contemporaries but the entire recorded history of the art form on the subcontinent.

The Records at a Glance

Conclusion

The story of Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge is, at its core, a story about what happens when a film connects — not with critics, not with the trade, not with algorithms — but with actual people who want to go to a cinema hall and spend three hours and forty-nine minutes watching something that feels worth their time.

Those people showed up on Day 0. They brought their friends on the first Saturday. They were still sending those friends six weeks later. They went to the box office, opened BookMyShow, and bought a ticket for what was already one of the highest-grossing Indian films in history — not because they were told to, but because the conversation around this film was one they wanted to be part of.

That is what Rs 1,837 crore looks like when you break it down to its human components. One ticket at a time, across 5 lakh shows, in cinemas from Mumbai to Manchester, it became the second-biggest Indian film ever made.

Baahubali 2 held that position for nearly a decade. It took Aditya Dhar forty-eight days.

Video: Jio Studios