Munna Bhai MBBS was released in an empty theatre | Theatres were empty at the time of release of Munna Bhai MBBS: Vidhu Vinod said- Hirani was heartbroken, he thought his money was wasted

The film Munna Bhai MBBS was a huge hit. Even in the 26th week of its release, the film was running on 300 screens across India. But on the first day of release, the entire theatre was empty. Even after a week of release, there was absolutely no crowd of audience in the theatres. Because of this, the makers felt that this film would flop at the box office.

The director of the film is Raj Kumar Hirani.

The director was afraid that the film would flop

In a recent interview, Vidhu Vinod Chopra has reacted on the 2003 film Munna Bhai MBBS. He 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.

We had about Rs 4 crore at that time. I wanted to make another film. I didn’t care if Munnabhai would work or not. Though the film started picking up after Monday, seats remained empty during the weekend. I didn’t really wait for the film to be successful to make another film.

Earlier, during an event at Kellogg School of Management, Rajkumar Hirani had revealed that no distributor was willing to buy the rights of the film. Later, somehow a distributor from Tamil Nadu agreed to buy the rights. However, later he too turned away.

Munna Bhai MBBS was the last released film of Sanjay Dutt’s father Sunil Dutt. The second sequel of the film Lage Raho Munna Bhai was released in 2006.