Box Office India

About Box Office India

Box Office India is a film trade magazine published from Mumbai, launched in September 2009 by Select Publishing Company, a division of Select Media Holdings. Positioned as India's premier film trade magazine, it serves the Hindi film industry's professionals — producers, distributors, exhibitors, financiers and marketers — with box-office data, industry news, analysis, interviews and coverage of the business of cinema. The publisher is Nitin Tej Ahuja, who launched the title from offices at 303, Morya Classic, off New Link Road, Andheri West, Mumbai. The magazine is supported by the digital property boxofficeindia.com, which carries extensive box-office databases, and it once shared content with the US theatrical-exhibition magazine Boxoffice through a strategic tie-up. It is distinct from the American Boxoffice magazine: the two titles are owned by different media houses and are not inter-related.

Launch in September 2009

Select Publishing Company's first offering, Box Office India, was launched in September 2009 as a film trade magazine — the company's entry into publishing under the Select Media Holdings umbrella. The launch filled a gap in Indian film-trade journalism: a professionally produced, data-driven trade publication for an industry that obsesses over box-office numbers but had long lacked a single authoritative trade journal. From the outset the magazine was built around the trade's core currency — collections data — and was edited for industry insiders rather than general film fans. The title's editorial and advertising offices were set up at 303, Morya Classic, off New Link Road, Andheri West, Mumbai 400053, in the heart of the industry's western-suburbs hub.

The Select Media Holdings publisher

The magazine is published by Select Publishing Company, a division of Select Media Holdings, with Nitin Tej Ahuja as publisher. Ahuja has been the public face of the title since its launch, articulating its mission to redefine what an Indian film trade publication should look like in terms of size, layout, paper and design. Select Media Holdings also publishes the monthly music trade magazine Sound Box — the group's second magazine, launched in 2010 with a cover price of Rs 150, a 60-page format and an 80:20 edit-to-ad ratio, aimed at the music industry's creators and users as well as telecom companies, internet service providers and retail music shops. The two titles share the group's Andheri West base, with separate sales and editorial teams and some overlap between them.

Editorial team

The magazine's masthead has included editor Vajir Singh, who compiled the title's annual cumulative collections data; chief sub-editor Carol Lobo; head of desk Shikha Saroj Gupta; and correspondents including Rohini Nag, Soumita Sengupta and Swagata Panjari. The editorial operation combines box-office number-crunching with reporting on the industry's business: new film associations, actors signing projects, emerging trends, corporate bookings and the financial mechanics of releases. The magazine's data journalism — annual cumulative collections tables tracking the number of releases and total domestic net box office from 2009 onwards — has made it a reference for the industry's own record-keeping, documenting phases of expansion and regression at the Hindi box office year by year.

Anniversary issues and design ambition

Box Office India marked its anniversaries with production feats designed to make trade-press history. For its first anniversary in September 2010, the fortnightly brought out a cover with foil embossing — claimed as a first for any trade publication. For its second anniversary, the magazine produced a 200-plus-page issue whose cover and back panel used 3D lenticular printing, a first by any magazine in the country; the company spent Rs 500 per copy on the cover and back panel alone, excluding the printing cost of the rest of the magazine. For the anniversary issue the magazine tied up with Red Chillies Entertainment and Eros, who were promoting the Shah Rukh Khan starrer RA.One — a 3D film, making it, in the publisher's words, a perfect fit with the cover concept. These set-piece issues embodied the publisher's stated aim of giving the industry a trade magazine it had never seen before.

Content-sharing deal with US Boxoffice

The magazine entered a strategic content-sharing tie-up with Boxoffice Media LLC of New York, the publisher of Boxoffice Magazine — the official magazine of the US theatrical exhibition and of NATO, the US-based National Association of Theatre Owners, published since 1920 and the first magazine to report box office numbers in 1937. Under the deal, Box Office India published content prepared especially for the Indian cinema industry by the American magazine: every week the Indian title dedicated four pages to the shared content, ranging from news and reviews to trends, interviews and North American box-office collections, with coverage of Hollywood and independent films. The publisher described it as more than syndication — the US team created content relevant to Indian readers through constant dialogue, including the American viewpoint on stories such as Shah Rukh Khan's airport detention, North American grosses for Indian films, and social-media tracking of Indian releases. The two publications remained separately owned and not inter-related.

Box-office data and trade authority

At the heart of the magazine's trade authority is its collections reporting. The title's annual tables have tracked the Hindi film industry's domestic net box office from the year of the magazine's launch: 2009 saw 91 releases and Rs 1,201 crore in total domestic net collections, rising through Rs 1,537 crore (2010), Rs 1,769 crore (2011), Rs 2,392 crore (2012) and Rs 2,818 crore (2013), before the trend reversed in 2014. The magazine has reported matter-of-factly on industry practices such as corporate and block bookings — noting, for instance, the "excellent advance" for the Aamir Khan starrer PK with "block bookings by corporate forming a huge proportion", and the outsized corporate advances for the major Khan starrers. Media commentators have called it "the trade magazine the Hindi film industry swears by", and its figures are routinely cited in national press coverage of box-office disputes, as in the Mint analysis of why Indian collections "depend on who you ask".

BOI Activations and industry partnerships

The magazine has extended its brand into industry partnerships, notably joining hands with Endemol Shine India for 'BOI Activations' — a venture under which Box Office India conceives and executes innovative film and TV tie-ins and integrations around Endemol Shine India's popular formats, including on-ground activities across cities and television show tie-ups, with the resulting content broadcast or streamed on television and digital platforms. The publisher described the association as serving the magazine's central mission of serving the Indian film industry, giving producers promotional reach and consumers interesting content. The partnership illustrates how the title has monetised its industry relationships beyond the printed page, acting as a bridge between film producers and the television and digital platforms that amplify their releases.

Digital presence: boxofficeindia.com

The magazine's digital arm, boxofficeindia.com, carries one of the most detailed public databases of Indian box-office performance: all-time rankings for first-day, first-weekend, first-week and lifetime collections in India, overseas and worldwide, plus territory-wise top grossers, footfall data, star rankings by hit count and success count, and user ratings. The site's tables — tracking films from Baahubali 2 and Dangal through Jawan, Pathaan and Animal — are a working reference for the trade and for film journalists. Based at the same Andheri West address as the magazine, the digital property extends the print title's data mission into a continuously updated online resource, keeping the Box Office India brand in daily contact with the industry it serves.

Box Office India's official website is boxofficeindia.com, with the magazine's box-office databases and trade coverage.