Forty-one days ago, nobody was betting on Hanuman Ansh. The Neem Karoli Baba biopic opened on August 7 and spent its first two weeks collecting a combined Rs 1.48 crore, the kind of number that usually means a film vanishes from screens within a week. It didn't vanish. It's now sitting at a worldwide gross of Rs 300.25 crore.

According to Sacnilk, the film added Rs 6 crore net in India on Day 41 alone, pushing its domestic net total to Rs 237.13 crore. The gross domestic number stands at Rs 280 crore. Add the overseas run, which kicked off separately on September 11, and international collections have climbed to Rs 20.25 crore gross after six days abroad, where the film earned Rs 1.75 crore on its sixth day.

Put those together and you get a worldwide gross past the Rs 300 crore mark, on a film reportedly made for around Rs 2 crore. That's not a hit ratio you see often. It's the kind of number that gets thrown around at trade meetings for years.

What happened in between the flop-looking opening and the runaway third week isn't fully explained in the trade numbers, but the pattern is clear enough. A film that limped through its first fourteen days somehow found an audience, and then kept finding more of it, week after week, until the collections stopped looking like typical biopic business and started looking like a phenomenon.

A film about a guru with a famous fan list

Hanuman Ansh tells the story of Neem Karoli Baba, the spiritual figure whose devotees over the decades reportedly include names like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Julia Roberts, Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma. That name-drop alone has kept the film in conversation well beyond the usual devotional-cinema crowd, and it's likely part of why word of mouth traveled the way it did.

Director Vishal Chaturvedi isn't waiting around to see where the number settles. Speaking to an audience at a multiplex in Agra a few days ago, he confirmed a sequel is already being planned. Per his comments, the follow-up will spend its opening stretch in Firozabad, Neem Karoli Baba's birthplace, before moving through Agra, Mathura and other locations tied to his spiritual life.

No release window has been announced for that sequel yet, and there's no confirmation on cast or budget either. But with a Rs 2 crore film sitting at Rs 300 crore and climbing, that's a conversation the industry will be watching closely. The original is still running in both domestic and international markets, so the final tally isn't in yet, not by a long shot.