Salman Khan’s ‘Radhe: Your most wanted Bhai’ has seemingly became an unprofitable deal for Zee Studios that had owned the streaming rights for close to ₹230 crore along with a few other films in a bundle deal.
With the film loosing its collection in domestic market due to closed theatres, Zee’s struggle to recover costs from the pay-per-view strategy has ended up in damp squib and on top of that, the film proved to be a fiasco in international markets.
The pay-per-view model too didn’t go as expected for Zee. Zee said Radhe got 4.2 million views across online and DTH platforms on its opening day and that huge traffic had caused servers to shut down temporarily on the first day. Radhe is accessible for a one-time watch for ₹249 on ZeePlex. Existing Zee5 subscribers can also watch the film by paying an extra ₹249.
Radhe was Released in markets such as the US, UK, UAE, Australia and New Zealand, and made $1.875 million. However it is the lowest when compared to Salman’s previous films, which easily collected 4-6 million dollars.
Also Zee entertainment had to hire a legal cyber cell team to find the culprits who were disseminating pirated film. A complaint was lodged with the Mumbai Cyber Cell and it was learnt that a Facebook user had been selling the pirated film via WhatsApp for INR 50. With that Zee accumulated more losses than expected.