'Players' hasn't succeeded in giving a great start to the New Year. As pointed out on this column last weekend, the film's fate depended upon word of mouth coming into play since the buzz wasn't really high for this multi starrer affair. This is the reason why even when the film opened on a lower note on Friday, there weren't alarm bells ringing loud though there was a slightly scary situation that had set in.

However it was the dreaded Saturday that more or less sealed the fate of the film, what with 'Players' hardly showing any growth. With Sunday seeing some push in collections, the collections were maintained at the least but still didn't quite see the kind of escalation that would have made Abbas-Mustan breathe easy. With weekend collections just a little over 15 crore, 'Players' could well have been termed as 'down and out' if not for the fact that there are still two more weeks left before 'Agneepath' arrives.

This means that if 'Players' somehow hangs on during the weekdays, it could make the most of the coming weekend due to minimal competition ahead. As stated last week, 'Players' could have benefited immensely from its release timing and it would be the second weekend that would be the deciding factor. Of course one is looking at a miracle here and in the recent past, one remembers only one film that had turned out to be a success despite a poor weekend - 'Pyaar Ka Punchnama'. Still, that film was a low budget affair whereas 'Players' has crores invested in it.

Ironically though the word of mouth for 'Players' isn't all the bad and it can be termed as mixed at the least with quite a few indeed having good words to say about it. Still, since there were hardly many people who stepped in theatres during the weekend, small proportion of word of mouth is unfortunately not been heard much.