Vicky Kaushal, in a recent interview with The Week, addressed his film Sam Bahadur's clash with Ranbir Kapoor's Animal at the box office. Sam Bahadur was critically acclaimed and had a decent box office collection, while Animal was a smash hit. When asked, "Did your film perform as per your expectations," Vicky Kaushal replied, "With Sam, we always knew it was a Test match, we knew it was not the quintessential masala film that Animal was - it had the shock value and one knew it would create waves at the box office. We knew we needed that much time, that word of mouth, for the film to resonate with the masses. Because if it would not click with people, it would not do well no matter when it released. People started talking about it more and more as the weeks went by. We saw that through January, Sam shows kept going on, and that gives me tremendous happiness."
Sam Bahadur brought to life the story of war hero and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, Sam Bahadur was directed by Meghna Gulzar and it also featured Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanya Malhotra. This was Vicky Kaushal's second project with Meghna Gulzar. The duo have earlier worked together in the 2018 critically acclaimed Raazi, which was also a box office hit.
The film opened to stellar reviews. Film critic Saibal Chatterjee, in his review for NDTV, gave Sam Bahadur a 3.5 star rating out of 5 and he wrote, "It would be easy to describe Sam Bahadur as a Vicky Kaushal show because it is who dominates every major scene in the film. But without the fine balance that Meghna Gulzar strikes between ambition and restraint, neither the spirited central performance nor its emotional (and cinematic) payoff would have been quite as remarkable."