Haiwaan just had the box office equivalent of a flat EEG. Day 5 collections came in at Rs 70 lakh net in India, identical to what the film made on Day 4, according to data tracked by Sacnilk. Same number, different day, across 2,976 shows.

That kind of stagnation is rarely a good sign for a big-star release five days out from a Friday opening. The film's India net collection now stands at Rs 8.75 crore, with gross at Rs 10.46 crore. Overseas, it picked up another Rs 15 lakh on Day 5, pushing the international gross to Rs 3.15 crore. Add it up and Haiwaan's worldwide gross sits at Rs 13.61 crore.

The makers haven't put out an official budget figure, but trade estimates have pegged the production cost somewhere between Rs 100 crore and Rs 115 crore. Set that against a five-day worldwide gross that hasn't even crossed Rs 14 crore, and the arithmetic doesn't need much explaining. The film would need a sharp, sustained jump in daily numbers just to start closing that gap, and nothing in the Day 4-to-Day 5 trend suggests that's coming.

A remake that hasn't found its own audience

Haiwaan is Priyadarshan's Hindi remake of his own 2016 Malayalam film Oppam, retooled here as a Hindi action-crime thriller with Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan sharing the screen. Boman Irani and Shriya Pilgaonkar round out the cast. For Akshay and Saif, it's their seventh film together going back to Tashan in 2007, which under other circumstances would have been the marketing hook of the campaign.

Instead, reviews have landed mixed to negative, and audience word of mouth doesn't seem to have picked up the slack. The Free Press Journal's review gave it three stars, calling it watchable but familiar territory for anyone who's already seen Oppam, and noting it's more of a Saif showcase than an Akshay one, since Akshay's role is comparatively small.

That review probably captures the film's core problem. Viewers who know Oppam aren't finding much reason to show up again for the same story with new faces. Viewers who don't know Oppam are getting a serviceable thriller, per the reviews, but serviceable isn't what pulls people into cinemas on a weekday in September when a dozen other things are competing for their evening.

The next few days matter more than usual here. Haiwaan is heading into its first weekend after opening week, and a film parked at Rs 70 lakh a day with zero growth needs either a weekend bump or a much longer theatrical run than anyone budgeted for to have any shot at recovering its cost. Whether that bump shows up on Saturday will say a lot about how much further this one has left to run.