Getting lucky at the box office

Will the month of January be jinxed or jolly-ho at the box-office for Rohit Shetty's Sunday and Nagesh Kukunoor's Bombay to Bangkok ? Vajir Singh finds out.

There's no avoiding that jinx syndrome. The last as well as the first weeks of a year are believed to be jinxed for new movie releases.
By contrast, the second and the third weeks of January are considered auspicious to set the cash registers jingling.

By the law of averages, these January weeks have delivered at least one mega-hit, a trend discerned ever since the release of Rakesh Roshan's Karan Arjun 12 years ago. Kaho Naa.. Pyar Hai also did whopping business on being released during the same period eight years ago.

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More recently, Mani Ratnam's Guru released during mid-January was a crowd-puller. In 2006, ditto Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Rang De Basanti. A year before that it was Madhur Bhandarkar's National Award winning Page 3.

Hit or miss?
Which film will make it big in mid-January, 2008? Not much is expected from Chandrakant Singh's comedy Rama Rama Kya Hai Drama (Rajpal Yadav-Amrita Arora) but there's a buzz about Rohit Shetty's comic caper Sunday, a laugh-raiser with Ajay Devgan, Irrfan Khan and Ayesha Takia. Nagesh Kukunoor's romantic thriller Bombay to Bangkok could spring a surprise although the promos are on the tackier side.

The ‘lucky' January weeks will also witness the release of Rajkumar Santoshi's Halla Bol. E Niwas' My Name is Anthony Gonsalves introduces Nikhil Dwivedi and is being strongly promoted currently .