Four weeks in, and Bethlehem Kudumba Unit still hasn't had a bad day. The Nivin Pauly and Mamitha Baiju romcom has now pulled in £1.65 million at the UK box office, enough to overtake Mohanlal's L2: Empuraan, which closed its UK run at £1.61 million. That makes it the highest-grossing Malayalam film Britain has ever seen.

It's also bigger than the number suggests. Among South Indian films of any language, Bethlehem Kudumba Unit now sits third in UK lifetime collections, behind only Pushpa 2 and Baahubali 2. Catching Pushpa 2's tally looks out of reach for now. But Baahubali 2's UK number is just 170,000 pounds ahead, and if the Girish AD film manages a strong fifth weekend overseas, that gap could close within days.

Back home, the film hasn't dipped below a crore net on a single day since it opened, which is the kind of consistency Malayalam cinema rarely gets outside a handful of releases each year. On its fourth Wednesday it added another 1.25 crore net, running across roughly 1,400 screens, a number that would have most films four weeks old happy to be doing on a Friday.

The India net total now stands at 151.15 crore, translating to a gross of 178.36 crore. Add in the overseas leg, which picked up another 0.4 crore gross on Wednesday to take its own tally to 135.9 crore, and the film's worldwide gross has climbed to 314.26 crore.

What's driving the overseas run

Part of the story here is where the money is coming from. The UK has turned into an outsized market for this film specifically, not just a routine diaspora bump. Girish AD's film, produced by Fahadh Faasil, Dileesh Pothan and Syam Pushkaran under Fahadh Faasil and Friends, Bhavana Studios and Working Class Hero, was never pitched as an overseas tentpole. It's a small-town romantic comedy, the kind that usually plays out its life in Kerala multiplexes and moves on.

Instead it's outlasted bigger, louder releases in the UK charts, and audience chatter online has stayed warm through the run rather than fading after opening weekend, the sort of word-of-mouth trajectory that keeps a film's legs alive well past the usual three-week mark.

The cast also includes Sangeeth Prathap, Shyam Mohan, Suresh Krishna and Vinay Forrt.

What happens next hinges entirely on the coming weekend. A strong Friday-to-Sunday in the UK could see Bethlehem Kudumba Unit slot into second place among all South Indian films ever released there, ahead of Baahubali 2. Whether it can hold that pace into a fifth week, at home or abroad, is the number to watch before this one starts winding down.