Who Played The Lead Actor In Bollywood's First Rs. 1 Crore Blockbuster? It's Not Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna Or Raj Kapoor

B-Town Gossips: A movie breaking into the Rs 100- or Rs 200-crore club nowadays at the global box office is scarcely a huge affair. Indian films genuinely compete with Hollywood productions for box office revenues. The recently released Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone movie Pathaan is the perfect example of this; it did phenomenally well in both the Indian and foreign markets. The film entered the Rs. 300 crore club in only six days. Many domestic box office records were broken by it, including the records for the highest-grossing 2023 film and the highest-grossing Bollywood film. However, the current era is very different from the time when Indian single-screen theatre attendance was the only source of revenue for films. There were no elusive "100-crore" clubs. Here is a look back at the first Hindi film to earn Rs 1 crore at the box office.

Gyan Mukherjee's 1943 film Kismet, which he also directed, was the first to earn Rs 1 crore at the box office. Who would have imagined that the first Indian movie to break the crore barrier cost less than Rs 2 lakh? India was experiencing a nationalistic frenzy at the moment. The "Quit India" campaign had just begun. This feeling was tapped into in the patriotic crime thriller Kismet.

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Ashok Kumar played the lead role, portraying a figure analogous to Robin Hood who doesn't mind breaking the law to further the greater good. Film analysts claim that Ashok Kumar was a superstar and that audiences adored his role as a thief who cheated the system in order to aid the general populace. Bombay Talkies produced Kismet. It played for nearly three years at the Roxy Theatre in Calcutta. According to all estimations, it was the first movie to earn a crore. Because it was released in a united India, there was a larger crowd.

The melody "Door hato ae duniyawalon, Hindustan humara hai" has evolved into a national anthem. Films could only be produced at the time using restricted raw stock because it was costly and required importation. Films could only have a maximum of 12 reels between 1939 and 1945. The British made an exemption, nevertheless, for motion pictures that were thought to support their war efforts. They never discovered how the song "Door hato ae duniyawalon" took a subtle shot against the British.