Six weeks in, and Hanuman Ansh is still pulling weekday numbers that most films would happily settle for on a Friday. The Vishal Chaturvedi devotional drama added Rs 8.25 crore net on Day 39, taking its India net collection to Rs 222.88 crore and its India gross to Rs 263.30 crore, according to Sacnilk figures cited by Filmfare and The Free Press Journal.

The overseas leg is holding too. Another Rs 2 crore came in internationally on Day 39, pushing the total overseas gross to Rs 16.50 crore. Add it up and the worldwide figure now sits at Rs 279.80 crore.

That number matters because it puts Hanuman Ansh ahead of Mirzapur: The Movie in the global race, at least by the count Filmfare and DNA India are running. Here's the wrinkle. Filmfare has Mirzapur's worldwide gross at Rs 266 crore. DNA puts it at Rs 273.64 crore, and adds that the Prime Video spinoff has crossed Rs 190 crore net in India after opening to Rs 148 crore net in its first week alone. Either way, both outlets agree Hanuman Ansh has gone past it, just by different margins. Mirzapur is still running, so the gap could move.

What makes the whole thing strange is how it started. Hanuman Ansh opened on August 7 with Rs 10 lakh. Ten lakh. The first week brought in a combined Rs 1.08 crore, and the second week barely doubled the fortnight total to Rs 1.48 crore. Nobody was writing this film up as anything at that point.

Then it flipped. Week three jumped to Rs 10.4 crore. Week four went further still, with single-day numbers like Rs 12.75 crore on Day 24 alone beating what the film had made in its entire first fortnight. Free Press Journal points to word of mouth and the built-in audience for Neem Karoli Baba, the saint the film is built around, as the drivers. Monday occupancy on Day 39 was still around 26 percent across roughly 9,198 shows, which for a film in its sixth week is not nothing.

The budget on this thing was reportedly around Rs 2 crore. Whatever the final tally, the return is already absurd by any normal math.

Chaturvedi, who wrote, directed and produced Hanuman Ansh based on his own book, isn't waiting around either. He's already announced his next project, a film on Goswami Tulsidas titled RamBola, according to Filmfare. Hanuman Ansh itself is meant to be the first part of a planned trilogy drawn from that book.

For now, the film is closing in on Rs 300 crore worldwide, a mark that once looked like a stretch for anything running past its fifth week, let alone something that opened to Rs 10 lakh. Whether it gets there by the weekend, or slows down first, is the next thing to watch.