Shah Rukh Khan starrer Chennai Express mints Rs 33 crore on opening day

Chennai Express has averaged Rs 33.12 crore at box offices on the first day of its release. The collections surpass the earlier record for opening day earnings held by Salman Khan's Ek Tha Tiger.

Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone-starrer Chennai Express has collected an average of Rs 33.12 crore on the first day its opening.

The Red Chillies-UTV Motion Pictures' joint production leaves behind Salman Khan's Ek Tha Tiger record that earned Rs 31.25 crore on day one.

This Rohit Shetty's directorial venture earlier, set the ticket windows rolling on Thursday night with a record collection of Rs 6.75 crore from paid previews across India. Chennai Express surpassed the paid-preview collections' record set by 3 Idiots at Rs. 2.7 crore.

"We have received an overwhelming response from all quarters and the film is being loved by everyone. Though CE is playing in highest number of screens for any film, we still ran out of capacity in most locations due to this huge demand at the box office", says Gaurav Verma, Director - India theatrical distribution, Studios, Disney UTV.

Prakhar Joshi, Head - Programming PVR Cinemas also can't stop beaming about the success. "Now CE holds the record of biggest opening day at PVR- if you add previews, this number becomes even bigger. We were always confident of film doing well thus backed it with maximum show caning and right ticket pricing."

The movie opened in at least 3500 screens across the country on August 9.

The overall collection for Thursday in UK was £ 142,220 while in Australia and New Zealand A$ 38,315 and NZ$ 8,058, respectively.

The comic caper has made decent collections at foreign ticket windows as well.

(Figures: Twitter/TaranAdarsh, IMDB)