“Munna Bhai MBBS” is a superhit movie. Even today people watch this movie with great interest. But on the first day of release and the whole week, the entire theatre was going empty, due to which the makers felt that the movie would flop at the box office, then later even in the 26th week of release, the film ran on 300 screens all over India.
Recently in an interview, Vidhu Vinod Chopra while talking about the film Munna Bhai MBBS made in 2003 said- Munna Bhai MBBS was released in empty theatres. Raju (Rajkumar Hirani) was very upset thinking that I have lost a lot of money. At that time I gave 11 thousand rupees to Raju. After giving this money, I told Raju- I will not take anything and this is for the next film. Make another film. This is a great film.
At that time we had about 4 crore rupees. I wanted to make another film. I did not care whether Munna Bhai would work or not. Although the film started gaining momentum after Monday, the seats remained empty during the weekend. I did not really wait for the film to be successful to make a second film.
Earlier also, during an event at Kellogg School of Management, Rajkumar Hirani had revealed that no distributor was ready to buy the rights of the film, later somehow a distributor from Tamil Nadu agreed to buy the rights. However, later he also turned away.
Munna Bhai MBBS was the last released film of Sanjay Dutt’s father Sunil Dutt. Sanjay Dutt was very close to his father, Sunil always motivated Sanjay, Sunil Dutt was also a very good actor. The second part of Munna Bhai MBBS film “Lage Raho Munna Bhai” was released in 2006.
