Operation Valentine released on a pan-India scale on March 1. The movie sees Varun Tej essay the role of an Air Force fighter pilot. The film was well promoted ahead of its release with Varun and Manushi Chhhillar discussing the film extensively during its pan-India promotional tours. However, the movie's day one collection has been rather low.

Operation Valentine off to a slow start

According to Sacnilk, Operation Valentine earned ₹1.25 crore on its opening day in all languages in India. The film had an overall 16.97% Telugu Occupancy on Friday. The morning shows started a a very low occupancy at just around 16.44%, which went down to 13.95% for the afternoon shows. The evening shows witnessed a jump to 16.60% occupancy and night shows seeing 20.89% theatres being filled.

With some of the other releases in competition, it seems like Operation Valentine will have to face a tough battle at the box office. Operation Valentine is helmed by Shakti Pratap Singh Hada, in his directorial debut.

Varun Tej on his prep for Operation Valentine

Earlier, Varun Tej shared insights into his character of an Air Force fighter pilot in the film Operation Valentine, and said that roles like these are not easy, revealing about the homework he did in order to bring realism to his character. Talking about the challenges of portraying Arjun in the action thriller, Varun said, "Roles like these are not easy, and it's not like you are experienced or you see people from the Air Force in your day-to-day life."

"There was some homework that we did. We had a person from IAF who was working with us from the time the script was being made because we wanted to make a film that IAF is proud of also," shared the Ghani actor.