Breaking all records, Shahid Kapoor and Kiara Advani-starrer Kabir Singh is continuing to rule the box office in its third week. The film, which earned Rs 235.72 crore in first two weeks of its release, aims to cross the Rs 250-crore mark in its third week.

After earning Rs 9.61 crore on Sunday (July 7), Kabir Singh minted Rs 4.25 crore on its third Monday. The total box office collection of Kabir Singh till now is Rs 237.97 crore.

The film is already on its way to surpass the total collection of Salman Khan's Bharat and is now eyeing the top spot, dethroning Vicky Kaushal's URI: The Surgical Strike, the highest Bollywood grosser of 2019.

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Kabir Singh is now the fifth highest-grossing movie ever in third week. The film is behind Baahubali The Conclusion, Dangal, PK and URI: The Surgical Strike, as reported by boxofficeindia.com.

Though the film is being loved by the audiences, it received huge flak from critics. IndiaToday.in's Ananya Bhattacharya wrote, "Kabir Singh is about an uber-masculine, testosterone-driven person. But take it from someone who has walked out of a toxic, abusive relationship. There is nothing 'cool' about it. The 'manly' men in these relationships don't deserve the end that these films pander to us. No matter how many Sandeep Reddy Vangas and Kabir Singhs try to tell you otherwise. Some women leave this breed of abusive partners. Others cannot muster up the courage to do so. And then there are the heroines in Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Arjun Reddys and Kabir Singhs. Abuse is so normal in this world that the lead woman in the story is robbed of her voice."

It landed in another controversy when Kabir Singh director Sandeep Reddy Vanga defended the film staunchly in an interview by saying, "When you are deeply in love and deeply connected to a woman (and vice versa), if you don’t have the liberty of slapping each other, then I don’t see anything there."

Vanga lashed out at critics who had slammed the film and said, "Probably they never experienced (love) in the right way. It's new to them." He added, "For the Telugu film, people criticised numerous aspects in the film. But here, they were only on the feminist side, they didn’t speak about anything else. They probably hate me," he said.

Kabir Singh is the Hindi remake of Telugu blockbuster Arjun Reddy. While Shahid Kapoor played the titular role in Kabir Singh, Vijay Deverakonda played the lead role in the Telugu version. Kabir Singh tells the story of a surgeon who goes on a self-destructive path after his girlfriend is married to another man.

The film hit the screens on June 21.

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