Daayra, the Meghna Gulzar directed investigative thriller which released on Friday, opened to very low figures on its first day at box office. Loosely inspired from a true story in 2019, the film stars Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran in the lead cast.

According to Sacnilk, Daayra earned Rs 1.0 crores nett on Friday at domestic box office. The film performed uniformly low at all major centres, although the occupancies in Bangalore were significantly higher than Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. Overall, the film played at nearly 2300 screens all over the country, which is a considerably low figure for a star-studded film like this one.

While the reviews are largely lukewarm, it remains to be seen whether the film will show any improvement over the weekend. Reportedly made on a budget of Rs 50 crore, Daayra will likely struggle to touch 50 crore mark. 

With these incredibly low figures, Daayra has also turned out to be Kareena Kapoor’s second lowest opening film in more than 22 years, earning lower than some of her major box office failures like Milenge Milenge, Kurbaan, Main aur Mrs Khanna, Fida and Kyon Ki.

The only film lower on the list is The Buckingham Murders (2024), where too Kareena incidentally played a cop.

Daayra’s box office performance was also affected to a major extent because of the other major release this week, Vibe, which stars Kunal Kemmu, Sparsh Shrivastava, and Preity G Zinta in lead cast.

Written by Meghna Gulzar, Sima Agarwal and Yash Keswani, the film also features Kshitee Jog, Kanwaljit Singh and Biswapati Sarkar in the supporting cast.

In our review for the film, we noted, “As a police procedural, Daayra makes for a compelling watch. It gets deep into the technicalities and feels like a studied, researched narrative. A treat for fans of true crime. It also poses questions on an apathetic police system whose delay costs a girl her life.”