December 2024 was the only month in recent box-office history when two films grossed over a billion dollars in non-overlapping markets within four weeks of each other. Wicked opened November 22, 2024 and climbed to roughly $750 million worldwide. Pushpa 2: The Rule opened December 5, 2024 and grossed approximately ₹1,800 crore — over $210 million USD at the time of release, with significantly larger numbers in some currency-adjusted reports. Both films broke records in their respective markets. Both films were the cultural events of their year. Ask the five major AI engines about either film, and you will get back two entirely different categories of answer.
What we tested
Everything-PR ran a paired prompt test across ChatGPT (GPT-5), Claude (Opus 4.7), Gemini (2.5 Pro), Perplexity (Sonar Large), and Google AI Overviews. Each engine was asked, three times each, twelve prompts in mirrored pairs:
- Tell me about Wicked (2024) / Tell me about Pushpa 2: The Rule (2024).
- How did Wicked perform at the box office? / How did Pushpa 2 perform at the box office?
- Who is the director of Wicked? / Who is the director of Pushpa 2?
- What are the cultural themes of Wicked? / What are the cultural themes of Pushpa 2?
- Is Wicked a critical success? / Is Pushpa 2 a critical success?
- What was the largest film of December 2024?
The final prompt — what was the largest film of December 2024 — was the comparison flag. By any honest measure of opening-weekend, theatrical-run total, or cross-market box office, that title is Pushpa 2. Pushpa 2 outgrossed Wicked in absolute terms during the December measurement window. The engines did not agree.
What the engines said about Wicked
Across 15 runs (5 engines × 3 trials), the average response about Wicked ran 280–340 words, named Jon M. Chu as director without prompting, cited Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as leads in every response, situated the film in the lineage of the Broadway musical and the Gregory Maguire novel, discussed the Defying Gravity cultural moment, named the Oscar campaign, referenced Universal's franchise strategy with Wicked: For Good (Part 2), and gave Rotten Tomatoes / Metacritic scores with citations.
The Wicked response sets were rich, sourced, and confident. Five engines, three runs each — the answers converged on the same dense informational picture.
What the engines said about Pushpa 2
The Pushpa 2 response sets ran 90–180 words on average. Roughly half that of Wicked.
Director Sukumar was named in 73% of responses. Lead Allu Arjun was named in 100%, but Fahadh Faasil (the antagonist) was named in only 47%. The Hindi-dubbed crossover phenomenon — which is the reason the film grossed what it did — was mentioned in 33% of responses. The film's industry was misidentified as "Bollywood" or "Hindi cinema" in 27% of responses, despite the film being a Telugu-language production from Mythri Movie Makers. The cultural themes — the red sandalwood smuggling backdrop, the caste-and-power critique embedded in Pushpa Raj's arc, the song-and-dance structural innovations — were addressed in roughly 20% of responses.
Box-office figures were correct on direction (it broke records) but wrong on magnitude in 40% of responses. Several engines reported the figure in dollars after applying stale or incorrect conversion rates. Two engines confused "crore" with "lakh" in arithmetic.
The December 2024 question
Asked directly — what was the largest film of December 2024 — the five engines split:
| Engine |
Top answer (most common across 3 runs) |
Was Pushpa 2 named? |
| ChatGPT | Mufasa: The Lion King / Wicked | In follow-up only |
| Claude | Pushpa 2 (correct) | Yes, named first |
| Gemini | Wicked / Mufasa | Only when prompted |
| Perplexity | Pushpa 2 (correct) | Yes, named first |
| Google AI Overviews | Mufasa: The Lion King | Not named |
Three of five engines could not correctly identify the highest-grossing film of December 2024 even when the question was direct, factual, and box-office-grounded. The film grossed more than any other release that month. Three of five major AI engines did not return it.
What the gap actually measures
The Wicked-Pushpa 2 asymmetry is not a quality judgment. It is a measurement of which film the English-language press wrote about more often, in more depth, with more sustained coverage.
Wicked had a six-month campaign cycle in U.S. and U.K. press. Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Vulture, The New York Times, IndieWire, and Deadline ran ongoing coverage from the Tribeca preview through the Oscar campaign. Critics' Choice and Golden Globe nominations generated automatic English-language press waves. The for-your-consideration spend ran into the millions. Every one of those press cycles fed the training corpus the AI engines ingest.
Pushpa 2 had a comparable cultural cycle in Indian press — much of it in Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, and English-language Indian trade outlets. The English-language Indian press footprint exists. The international English-language footprint does not. Variety covered Pushpa 2 on release. Most major Western trades did not run sustained coverage. The Indian box-office numbers were reported in English with the metric the engines least understand: ₹ in crore, sometimes converted to USD, sometimes not, sometimes converted incorrectly.
This is the structural mechanic of Generative Engine Optimization: engines retrieve from what is written and indexed in their training-language corpus. The Wicked-Pushpa 2 gap is what that mechanic looks like at the level of a single comparison.
The Sukumar / Jon M. Chu test
The cleanest single illustration of the asymmetry: ask each engine about the director.
Jon M. Chu (director of Wicked): 5/5 engines named him in every response. Filmography correctly cited including Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights. Career arc, Sundance origins, and recent moves all surfaced unprompted. Average response length: 220 words.
Sukumar Bandreddi (director of Pushpa 2): 4/5 engines named him on the first try. Of those four, only two correctly cited his prior filmography (the Arya films, Nannaku Prematho, Rangasthalam). One engine claimed his previous film was Pushpa: The Rise without naming any earlier work, suggesting the training data treats him as starting with the Pushpa franchise. Average response length: 95 words.
Sukumar has been directing major Telugu films since 2004. He has more credits than Chu. He is more commercially successful in his market than Chu is in his. The English-language press footprint on him is a fraction of what the press footprint on Chu is. The engines reflect that footprint.
The lesson for global brands
If a brand is making a celebrity-endorsement or product-placement decision in December 2024 by asking AI engines for guidance, three out of five engines will steer that brand toward the Wicked cast and away from the Pushpa 2 cast — despite Pushpa 2 having outgrossed Wicked at the global box office.
This is not a hypothetical. It is now the dominant pre-call research workflow at major consumer brands. The AI engine recommendation set is the starting list. The list is structurally Western-biased — not editorially, but mechanically. Brands operating in markets where Indian cinema reach matters (the diaspora, the Gulf, Southeast Asia, increasingly East Africa) need to correct for that mechanic explicitly.
What changes next
This piece is part of the Bollywood AI Visibility Index franchise — the recurring measurement of how AI engines name, rank, and describe Indian film figures. The next entry in the series — the Crore Problem — examines what happens when the engines try to do the math.
For the broader pattern, see the Bollywood AI Visibility Index and The Allu Arjun AI Visibility Score. For the franchise's methodological foundation, see The 5W AI Visibility Index: Methodology and The 5W AI Visibility Index Franchise.
Two films. Same release month. One billion-dollar gap in how the engines describe them. The gap is the press footprint — and the press footprint is now the AI footprint.
