It's well understood that a film's trailer can have a decisive impact on its opening box office. But how sizeable can this impact be, in box office terms? Let's understand using examples of the biggest Hindi films of 2023.

In post-pandemic times, Hindi films have taken a different approach to marketing, often releasing the main trailer much after the teaser and some songs have been released. This is somewhat similar to how major South Indian language films market themselves. From an analytics perspective, this allows us to look at data points at three different times for each  film:

Wk T-: The week before the main trailer's launch
Wk T: The week of the main trailer's launch
Wk T+: The week after the main trailer's launch

For this analysis, we have considered the five biggest Hindi theatrical releases of 2023 so far: Pathaan, Gadar 2, Jawan, Tiger 3, and Animal. For each film, we look at the Appeal on Ormax Cinematix, our campaign tracking and first-day box office (FBO) forecasting tool, in Wk T-, Wk T, and Wk T+. Appeal is a percentage measure of audiences who have a definitive intention to watch the film in a theatre, at the time of asking them the question. The base for Appeal is audiences aware of the film, which was 90% for all five films in Wk T in any case.

The chart below showcases the week-on-week Appeal change for the five films.

As can be seen, Animal is the clear outlier, with a 13-point (or 22%) growth in its Appeal from Wk T- to Wk T+. The other four films average only a 1-point (or 1%) increase from Wk T- to Wk T+. It's not as if their trailers did not work. But they worked towards sustaining the existing Appeal, than being able to increase it. In contrast, Animal's trailer (video below), which came after the teaser and three song videos were already out, did something most campaigns with a late trailer launch do not manage to. It got a set of new audiences interested in the film. The FBO (first-day box office forecast) of Animal jumped from ₹25.9 Cr (WK T-) to ₹48.7 Cr (Wk T+, which also happened to be the week of the film's release). The film eventually went on to do more than ₹50 Cr (Hindi version, nett) on its opening day.

The message is clear. No matter how big your film is, never underestimate the impact a strong trailer can have on its box office fortunes.

If you would like to know more about trailer testing, you can contact us, or read more about our campaign testing tool Ormax Campaign Express here.