Hanuman Ansh has pushed past Rs 300 crore worldwide by its 41st day in theatres, a number that would have sounded absurd for a film whose first day brought in barely Rs 10 lakh.

The Vishal Chaturvedi directorial, a dramatised telling of Neem Karoli Baba's life, added another Rs 6 crore net domestically on Day 41 alone, pushing its total India net collection to Rs 237.13 crore. India gross now sits at Rs 280 crore. Overseas, the film picked up Rs 1.75 crore on the same day, taking its international gross to Rs 20.25 crore. Put the two together and the global gross total lands at Rs 300.25 crore.

A Rs 2 crore film outrunning everything else

Here's the number that makes this worth writing about. Hanuman Ansh reportedly cost only around Rs 2 crore to make. Not two hundred crore, not twenty. Two. A film that spent less than a single big-budget song sequence has now pulled in over 150 times its cost, and it's still running.

The film opened in Indian theatres on September 7 and rolled out overseas four days later, on September 11. Its Day 1 tally barely registered on trade radars. What changed the picture was word of mouth, the slow kind, the sort that trade watchers say took close to three weeks to build into a wave strong enough to fill screens on its own. By the sixth week, Hanuman Ansh was doing business that films with marketing budgets several times its total spend would envy.

The story follows a young Lakshmi Narayan, who sets off across North India after his mother's death, chasing answers about life, death and suffering. Somewhere on that road, per the film, he becomes the saint the world knows as Neem Karoli Baba, whose teachings on service and compassion outlived him by decades. Shobinaw Satyaa plays the lead.

Part of the film's pull, going by the chatter around it, comes from Neem Karoli Baba's own cultural footprint. Steve Jobs is said to have made a trip to India in 1974 hoping to meet him. Mark Zuckerberg visited Kainchi Dham years later, reportedly on Jobs's advice during a difficult stretch. Closer home, Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma have made the same pilgrimage and are among the guru's more visible Indian devotees, a detail that keeps resurfacing in conversations about the film.

Online reaction has split down the middle. Some viewers are asking why a film with these numbers took weeks to find an audience in the first place. Others see the slow build as proof this is real word of mouth, not opening-weekend inflation.

What happens next is where it gets uncertain. A Telugu release was reportedly in motion with Trivikram Srinivas attached, but recent reports suggest that plan has stalled and a teaser event tied to it has been shelved. Whether Hanuman Ansh gets a wider regional push from here, or simply keeps grinding out crores in its existing markets, will decide how much higher this number climbs before it's done.