Five weeks ago, Hanuman Ansh opened on roughly 250 screens and nobody in the trade was paying much attention. Today it's sitting on a gross of Rs 205.73 crore, according to trade tracking site Sacnilk, with nett collections crossing Rs 170 crore domestically.

That's not a small jump. The film, released on August 7, spent its first two weeks putting up numbers that barely registered on the charts. Distributors weren't exactly lining up. Then word of mouth did what it sometimes does in Hindi cinema, slowly and then all at once, and exhibitors responded by widening the release from 250 screens to 2,000.

Directed by Vishal Chaturvedi, Hanuman Ansh traces the life of Neem Karoli Baba, the spiritual leader whose ashram at Kainchi Dham has drawn devotees for decades, including a long list of Silicon Valley names over the years. The film follows a young man called Lakshminarayan through grief, after his mother's death, and into a search for meaning that eventually turns him into the saint himself. It's built around themes of love, service and compassion rather than plot mechanics, which is usually the kind of film that struggles to find screens, let alone hold them for five weeks.

Shobhinaw Satya plays the lead, with Vihaan Shedge, Chandan K Anand, Purnima Tiwari, Anil Rastogi, Gulshan Pandey and Bhagvandas rounding out the cast. None of these are names that typically open a film wide. Which is precisely why the screen expansion from 250 to 2,000 is the number worth sitting with here, more than the gross itself. That kind of jump usually only happens when exhibitors are chasing an audience that's already showing up in numbers they can't ignore.

The slow-burn trajectory puts Hanuman Ansh in a small club of recent Hindi releases that opened quietly and grew into genuine box office stories on the back of audience response rather than marketing spend or opening-weekend hype. Trade watchers will now be tracking whether the film can sustain its current screen count through a second month, or whether the surge plateaus once the initial word-of-mouth audience has been through the theatres.

What happens over the next fortnight will decide how this one gets remembered, as a sleeper hit that outran its own release strategy, or as a film that peaked once curiosity ran its course. For now, the numbers are still climbing, and so is the screen count.