The famous boxoffice clash of Welcome and Taare Zameen Par 16 years ago

2023 was a year of big box office clashes for Bollywood. Be it OMG 2 vs Gadar 2 or Animal vs Sam Bahadur, there were many weekends throughout the year where many movies collided and competed with each other for the audience’s attention. While the reducing number of footfalls has substantially led to growth of importance of opening weekend collections, hence making an event out of bollywood box office clashes, there were times when audience had enough time and patience to catch all the clashing movies, if they had good reports.

One such weekend occurred exactly 16 years ago, with the releases of two projects backed by big stars - Welcome and Taare Zameen Par. 

Welcome was a bonafide masala film, Taare Zameen Par wasn't

Directed by Anees Bazmee, Welcome boasted of huge box office stars like Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif, besides boasting of actors like Anil Kapoor, Nana Patekar, Mallika Sherawat and Paresh Rawal in the ensemble cast.

Shot at exotic locations and with a storyline that provides ample space for non-laughter, Welcome ticked every box in order to be a guaranteed box office success, the same couldn’t necessarily be said of Taare Zameen Par. Even though a big star like Aamir Khan was headlining the project, the film wasn’t a regular romance or drama film that Hindi film goers were used to. To make matters more complicated, the film revolved around a young boy’s life, and didn’t have either a conventional love interest angle for any of the characters or the usual song-and-dance routine.

Both Welcome and Taare Zameen Par became boxoffice hits

However, when both the films released, while Welcome opened to relatively higher figures on day 1 and collected Rs. 3.32 crore (as compared to Taare Zameen Par’s figures of Rs. 2.62 crore), both the films eventually sustained steady collections for the next 2 weeks. Taare Zameen Par, in particular, had great word-of-mouth response, and hence attracted family audience in equal numbers as Welcome. Finally, at the end of their theatrical run, Welcome landed with a domestic lifetime collection of approximately 70 crores, Taare Zameen Par too wasn’t far behind, collecting nearly 61 crores at domestic box office.

And more importantly, both the films have earned a fanbase of their own, for varying reasons. While many dialogues and scenes from Welcome have become popular memes, the blend of social messaging and entertainment that Taare Zameen Par carried was a quality that many films strived for in coming years, in an era increasingly dominated by urbane audience markets.