Eighteen years after Tashan, Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan came back together for Haiwaan. The box office is not being kind to the reunion.

The film opened on September 11 with Rs 3 crore net, a soft start given the star wattage on the poster. Day two was supposed to bring some correction, the kind multiplex trade usually counts on once word of mouth kicks in over a Saturday. Instead, collections fell 16.67% to Rs 2.5 crore, according to Koimoi's estimates. Two days in, Haiwaan sits at Rs 5.5 crore net domestically, which DNA India pegs at roughly Rs 6.60 crore gross in India and Rs 8.60 crore gross worldwide once overseas numbers are added in.

That puts it behind, not ahead of, the actor's own recent misses. Mission Raniganj had banked Rs 7.6 crore in its first two days. Sarfira managed Rs 7 crore. Selfiee did Rs 6.35 crore. Haiwaan's Rs 5.5 crore trails all three, which is not the company an Akshay Kumar-Saif Ali Khan team-up wants to keep.

Priyadarshan directs, and this is his own remake of Oppam, the 2016 Malayalam thriller that had Mohanlal playing a blind man caught in a serial killer's crosshairs. That film also became the Kannada Kavacha in 2019. Mohanlal turns up in Haiwaan too, in a cameo, a nod back to the original. Boman Irani, Shriya Pilgaonkar and Saiyami Kher round out the cast, and the film carries an additional weight: it's the last screen appearance of Asrani, who died in October 2025.

Mixed to negative reviews haven't helped. Neither has a genre, crime thriller with a blind-witness premise, that doesn't always pull families or big weekend crowds the way an action tentpole would. The Saif-Akshay pairing was meant to be the draw, their first film together since 2008, going back further to Yeh Dillagi in 1994 and a run of titles through the nineties. Nostalgia hasn't translated into footfall.

What happens next matters more than the weekend total at this point. Day three might see a small bump, typical of Sundays, but trade already expects the opening weekend to close under Rs 10 crore net, which effectively settles the film's fate commercially. The real test is Monday, day four, when word of mouth either stabilises a film or lets it drop further. For Haiwaan, holding steady on a weekday would at least be something. A repeat of Saturday's fall would make this one of the quieter disasters of Akshay Kumar's year.