Quick answer: Liger’s final box office collection stands at roughly ₹41.17 crore net in India, ₹48.58 crore gross in India, and ₹56.18 crore gross worldwide, against a reported budget of ₹100–125 crore. The film opened at ₹15.95 crore net on day 1 and collapsed to under ₹35 lakh by its second Friday. Trade verdict: Disaster.
Liger box office collection at a glance
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| India net collection (all languages) | ₹41.17 crore |
| India gross collection | ₹48.58 crore |
| Overseas gross | ₹7.60 crore |
| Worldwide gross | ₹56.18 crore (some trackers report up to ₹66.89 crore) |
| Opening day (India net) | ₹15.95 crore |
| Opening weekend (Thu–Sun, India net) | ₹35.44 crore |
| Week 1 (8 days, India net) | ₹40.08 crore |
| Budget | ₹100 crore–₹125 crore (reports vary) |
| Worldwide theatrical rights value | ₹90 crore |
| Distributor losses | ₹60–65 crore (approx.) |
| Verdict | Disaster / box office bomb |
| Release date | 25 August 2022 (Thursday) |
| Languages | Telugu, Hindi (bilingual); dubbed in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam |
| Runtime | 138 minutes |
| OTT | Disney+ Hotstar, from 22 September 2022 |
Liger was written and directed by Puri Jagannadh and produced by Dharma Productions and Puri Connects, with Karan Johar, Charmme Kaur, Apoorva Mehta and Hiroo Yash Johar backing it. Vijay Deverakonda and Ananya Panday led the cast, with Ramya Krishnan, Ronit Roy and Mike Tyson in supporting roles. It was Deverakonda’s first straight Hindi-Telugu bilingual and, on paper, the biggest bet of his career.
Liger day-wise box office collection (India net)
The film released on a Thursday, which is unusual for a Hindi release and standard for a big Telugu one. That opening day number was respectable. Everything after it was not.
| Day | Date | India net | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 (Thursday) | 25 Aug 2022 | ₹15.95 Cr | — |
| Day 2 (Friday) | 26 Aug 2022 | ₹7.70 Cr | −51.7% |
| Day 3 (Saturday) | 27 Aug 2022 | ₹6.55 Cr | −14.9% |
| Day 4 (Sunday) | 28 Aug 2022 | ₹5.24 Cr | −20.0% |
| Day 5 (Monday) | 29 Aug 2022 | ₹1.50 Cr | −71.4% |
| Day 6 (Tuesday) | 30 Aug 2022 | ₹1.24 Cr | −17.3% |
| Day 7 (Wednesday) | 31 Aug 2022 | ₹1.05 Cr | −15.3% |
| Day 8 (Thursday) | 1 Sep 2022 | ₹0.85 Cr | −19.0% |
| Day 9 (Friday) | 2 Sep 2022 | ₹0.35 Cr | −58.8% |
| Day 10 (Saturday) | 3 Sep 2022 | ₹0.32 Cr | −8.6% |
| Day 11 (Sunday) | 4 Sep 2022 | ₹0.29 Cr | −9.4% |
| Day 12 (Monday) | 5 Sep 2022 | ₹0.13 Cr | −55.2% |
| Total | ₹41.17 Cr |
Two numbers in that table tell the whole story.
The first is day 3. Saturday is the day a film is supposed to grow. Every healthy Indian release adds 20–60% on its first Saturday over Friday. Liger fell 15%. The second is day 4: Sunday, the biggest day of any normal opening weekend, dropped another 20%. A film that loses money on Saturday and Sunday has been rejected by word of mouth inside 24 hours, and no amount of screen count can fix it.
By Monday the film was doing ₹1.5 crore a day across five languages and roughly 4,000 screens. Exhibitors began pulling shows within the first week, and reports at the time suggested more than 90% of shows had been cancelled in the Telugu states by the second weekend.
Liger box office collection: week-wise
| Period | India net |
|---|---|
| Week 1 (Day 1–8, Thu–Thu) | ₹40.08 Cr |
| Week 2 (Day 9–12, before shows dried up) | ₹1.09 Cr |
| Lifetime | ₹41.17 Cr |
Week 1 accounted for 97.4% of the film’s entire theatrical run. For comparison, a Telugu film with decent word of mouth usually earns 45–60% of its lifetime in week one. Liger effectively finished in five days.
Language-wise collection
| Language | Gross | Net |
|---|---|---|
| Telugu | ₹24.43 Cr | ₹21.00 Cr |
| Hindi | ₹21.02 Cr | ₹18.55 Cr |
| Tamil | ₹1.43 Cr | ₹1.27 Cr |
| Malayalam | ₹0.39 Cr | ₹0.34 Cr |
| Kannada | ₹0.01 Cr | ₹0.01 Cr |
| Total | ₹47.28 Cr | ₹41.17 Cr |
The Telugu and Hindi versions ended up almost level, which sounds like a pan-India success until you look at how they got there. The Telugu version front-loaded ₹13.99 crore net on day 1 alone and then evaporated. The Hindi version opened at just ₹1.25 crore net on Thursday, grew to ₹4.50 crore on Friday, and held the film up over the weekend. Hindi audiences were slower to arrive and slower to leave, but the ceiling was far lower than a Dharma-backed pan-India launch needed.
The dubbed versions were rounding errors. Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada together contributed ₹1.62 crore net, about 3.9% of the India total.
State-wise and area-wise breakdown
Gross collections across the first five days:
| Market | 5-day gross |
|---|---|
| Andhra Pradesh + Telangana | ₹21.10 Cr |
| Rest of India (Hindi belt) | ₹18.30 Cr |
| Karnataka | ₹1.92 Cr |
| Tamil Nadu | ₹1.49 Cr |
| Kerala | ₹0.44 Cr |
| Total | ₹43.25 Cr |
Within the Telugu states, distributor share came in around ₹12.39 crore across the run: Nizam ₹5.62 crore, Ceded ₹1.83 crore, Uttarandhra ₹1.73 crore, East ₹0.86 crore, Guntur ₹0.69 crore, Krishna ₹0.69 crore, West ₹0.55 crore, Nellore ₹0.42 crore.
Set that ₹12.39 crore share against what buyers paid. The Nizam territory alone was sold for around ₹25 crore. Ceded went for ₹9 crore, Uttarandhra ₹7.5 crore, Guntur ₹5.2 crore, Krishna ₹4.3 crore, East ₹5 crore, West ₹3.8 crore, Nellore ₹2.2 crore. That is a pre-release business of roughly ₹62 crore in AP/TG against a recovery of about ₹12 crore. Nizam buyers recovered somewhere near 22% of what they spent.
Overseas collection
Liger grossed ₹7.60 crore overseas, or about $4.88 million worldwide according to Box Office Mojo, of which India accounted for $4.44 million. The UAE contributed $210,018 and the UK $114,139. North America, normally the strongest overseas market for a Telugu star of Deverakonda’s standing, never got going after the reviews landed.
Budget vs recovery: how much did Liger lose?
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Production budget | ₹100–125 crore (reports vary) |
| Worldwide theatrical rights sold for | ₹90 crore |
| South India theatrical rights | ₹70 crore (₹60 crore for Telugu states) |
| OTT rights (Disney+ Hotstar) | ₹65 crore (reported) |
| Worldwide theatrical share recovered | ₹25–32 crore |
| Distributor shortfall | ₹60–65 crore |
This is where Liger’s economics get interesting, and where most box office reports stop too early.
The producers largely got out whole. Between the ₹90 crore theatrical sale and a reported ₹65 crore Disney+ Hotstar deal, plus satellite and music, the film had recovered most of its cost before a single ticket was sold. The people who took the hit were the distributors and exhibitors who bought territories at peak hype in the weeks after the trailer.
Bollywood Hungama’s trade analysis during the run projected the South Indian belt alone closing with a share of roughly ₹17 crore against ₹70 crore paid, a loss of about ₹53 crore, and total worldwide distributor losses of at least ₹65 crore.
Facing organised pressure from South distributors, Puri Jagannadh moved to compensate buyers for part of their losses, and Vijay Deverakonda was reported to have returned a chunk of his fee. Both were rare gestures in Indian film trade and an admission of how badly the pricing had run ahead of the product.
Also Read: Thank God Reviews: What Critics & Audiences Really Said (Full Breakdown)
Is Liger a hit or flop?
Flop understates it. Liger is a disaster by every trade classification in use in India. Box Office India lists the verdict as Disaster. Sacnilk lists it as Disaster. It recovered under 40% of its worldwide theatrical valuation and remains the largest failure of Vijay Deverakonda’s career, and one of the two biggest Telugu disasters of 2022 alongside Acharya.
For scale: 2022 was the year RRR grossed over ₹1,250 crore and KGF: Chapter 2 crossed ₹1,200 crore. In the same market, in the same year, a film with a Dharma banner, a Telugu star at his commercial peak and Mike Tyson on the poster finished under ₹57 crore worldwide.
Why Liger failed at the box office
Five things went wrong, roughly in order of damage done.
The reviews were brutal and they landed on day 1. Liger released on a Thursday, so by Friday morning every review, meme and audience reaction was already public. There was no protected weekend. Critics were particularly harsh on the writing and on Ananya Panday’s performance, and social media turned the film into a joke within hours.
Mike Tyson was a marketing asset, not a box office one. A large share of the budget and almost all of the international promotion rested on a cameo. Tyson has no ticket-selling record in Telugu or Hindi markets, and his screen time did not justify the positioning.
The pricing was fantasy. Puri Jagannadh and Deverakonda publicly talked about a ₹200 crore-plus gross target during promotions. Territories were sold on that expectation. Deverakonda’s biggest hits to that point, Arjun Reddy and Geetha Govindam, were mid-budget films that succeeded on word of mouth, not on opening-weekend scale. The pan-India math assumed a Hindi audience that had no relationship with him yet.
The off-screen controversy cost goodwill. Boycott campaigns targeted the film in the Hindi market ahead of release, and Deverakonda’s own comments during promotions became a talking point. Whether or not the campaigns moved tickets on their own, they poisoned the pre-release conversation at exactly the wrong time.
The film itself was a genre mismatch. A Puri Jagannadh mass template built around a stammering MMA fighter satisfied neither the Telugu audience wanting a proper Puri-style commercial entertainer nor the Hindi audience being sold a slick sports drama.
What happened after Liger
Disney+ Hotstar began streaming the film on 22 September 2022, less than four weeks after release, which is itself a signal that no one expected further theatrical life.
Jana Gana Mana, the announced follow-up between Puri Jagannadh and Vijay Deverakonda, was shelved after a producer backed out. Puri returned to Telugu cinema with Double iSmart in 2024. Deverakonda took a year off before Kushi in September 2023.
Liger vs Vijay Deverakonda’s other releases
| Film | Year | Opening day (India net) | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liger | 2022 | ₹15.95 Cr | Disaster |
| Kushi | 2023 | ₹15.25 Cr | Average |
| The Family Star | 2024 | ₹5.75 Cr | Flop |
| Kingdom | 2025 | ₹15.50 Cr | Better received |
Liger still holds Deverakonda’s highest opening-day India net. That is the strange legacy of the film: it proved he could open a movie, and then proved just as quickly that opening a movie is the easy part. Kingdom, released on 31 July 2025, grossed around ₹39 crore worldwide on day 1, beating Liger’s global opening, though on a slightly lower India net.
Frequently asked questions
What is the total box office collection of Liger?
Liger collected ₹41.17 crore net in India and ₹56.18 crore gross worldwide over its full theatrical run, with overseas contributing ₹7.60 crore.
How much did Liger earn on day 1?
₹15.95 crore net in India across all languages, or ₹18.70 crore gross. The Telugu version accounted for ₹13.99 crore net of that.
What was Liger’s budget?
Reports place the production budget between ₹100 crore and ₹125 crore. Worldwide theatrical rights were valued at ₹90 crore.
Is Liger a hit or a flop?
A disaster. It recovered well under half its theatrical valuation and left distributors with losses of roughly ₹60–65 crore.
How much loss did Liger distributors face?
Around ₹60–65 crore worldwide, with the South Indian belt alone accounting for about ₹53 crore. Puri Jagannadh later moved to compensate part of those losses.
How much did Liger earn in the Hindi version?
₹18.55 crore net and ₹21.02 crore gross in Hindi over the full run.
How much did Liger collect in the Telugu states?
₹21.10 crore gross in AP and Telangana over the first five days, yielding a distributor share of around ₹12.39 crore against roughly ₹62 crore in pre-release business.
Where can I watch Liger?
Liger has been streaming on Disney+ Hotstar since 22 September 2022, in Telugu, Hindi and dubbed versions.
How much did the Liger OTT rights sell for?
Disney+ Hotstar reportedly paid ₹65 crore for the streaming rights in February 2022, before release, which was among the largest OTT deals for a South Indian film at the time.
Did Liger cross ₹100 crore?
No. It finished at roughly half that worldwide, and its India net never crossed ₹42 crore.
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