‘Avengers: Endgame’, ‘Uri’ highest ticket sellers in 2019 on BookMyShow

Beating all local language offerings, Marvel’s superhero flick Avengers: Endgame emerged as the most popular film on online ticketing site BookMyShow in 2019, selling 8.6 million tickets, the highest for the year. It was followed by war epic Uri-The Surgical Strike that sold 5.6 million tickets.

The Bigtree Entertainment Pvt Ltd-owned website that released its annual entertainment report Show of the Year said demand for Hindi movies grew 12% from last year but non-Hindi local languages were not too far behind--films in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Marathi were amongst the top rated regional language films. In fact, demand for Malayalam movies rose 108% followed by English at 45%.

Following Avengers and Uri as the top ticket sellers were Shahid Kapoor’s controversial romantic drama Kabir Singh and action thriller Saaho. Meanwhile, movies with the longest shelf life, or the ones that remained listed for the longest time on the platform were Hollywood musical fantasy Aladdin (179 days) followed by Tamil movie Ayogya (125 days) and Kabir Singh (102 days).

Further, 30% of the top 10 movies (in terms of the number of tickets sold on BookMyShow) were based on real-life stories and incidents. As far as actors go, Akshay Kumar with 9.2 million tickets and Ayushmann Khurrana with 6.3 million tickets overall, dominated charts with three films each. Sunday evening was the most preferred show time for movie-goers while 3% of the total tickets were booked in the last 30 minutes before a movie’s the show time. Hyderabad was home to the maximum number of movie lovers, followed by Mumbai and Bengaluru. In fact, Hyderabad moved from fourth position in 2018 to outnumber its peers and lead the charts in 2019. Meanwhile, Kochi witnessed a 56% increase in the number of people using BookMyShow to watch films as compared to 2018.

The number of international live events listed on BookMyShow grew 62% in 2019 while the number of live events wholly executed by BookMyShow grew 156% since last year. Residents of Mumbai held the top position when it came to live entertainment experiences followed by the National Capital Region and Chennai. Jaipur emerged as the city with most number of customers buying tickets for live entertainment offerings, followed by Kochi and Guwahati. India’s fascination for cricket continued as the live entertainment genre which saw most ticket sales, followed closely by music concerts and theatricals. Home-grown music festival Sunburn grew significantly this year with over 3,00,000 fans attending the festival across shows. The top live event of the year was the U2: Joshua Tree Tour, for which 26% of attendees travelled from NCR, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai and Ahmedabad to Mumbai. It was followed by the NBA (National Basketball Association) India Games 2019 which saw 100% occupancy with the average ticket price for the event at Rs. 12,000.