Hanuman Ansh is having the kind of year most first-time producers dream about. It just isn't going to end with an Oscar nomination.

Producer Namrata Singh of SacredIP Trans Media Tech told Bollywood Hungama in an exclusive conversation that the team simply missed the window to submit the film as India's official entry for Best International Feature Film. The deadline was September 7, and by her own account, nobody on the team clocked it until it had already passed.

"We missed the Oscar submission deadline yesterday, as it was the last day," Singh said. "We got calls from a thousand people ki aap ne film submit nahin ki. But we didn't know about it."

No drama, no conspiracy. Just a small outfit with too many fires going at once.

Singh, a first-time producer working alongside first-time writer-director Vishal Chaturvedi, says the team has been consumed by an international rollout that needed a September 11 release date to line up with something the makers clearly consider non-negotiable. That date is the Mahasamadhi Day of Neeb Karori Baba, marking the anniversary of the saint's death in 1973, and Singh called the scramble to hit it "poori jaan le li." She added the crew is also "devotees" for whom the date carried its own weight beyond scheduling.

So the Oscar paperwork fell through the cracks. "The artists and director are on tour," she said. "There's hardly anyone in the office."

While the Academy submission slipped past them, the film's language expansion hasn't. The same September 11 announcement that marked the Mahasamadhi date also confirmed a Telugu version, with Trivikram Srinivas of Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo fame attached to the dub. It opens in cinemas on September 18. Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada versions are not currently in the works, Singh said, at least not yet. "I am just not getting the time," she said, half-laughing. "First, we have done dubbing for Telugu and then work on the rest of the languages."

The team is also building out accessibility features for viewers with disabilities, alongside a mobile game developed by the studio behind FAU-G and a comic book tie-in Singh says is being discussed with one of the country's bigger publishers.

All of which points to a film being run less like a single theatrical release and more like a franchise in the making, even as the crew that's building it stays small enough that a national deadline can quietly come and go unnoticed. Bollywood Hungama had earlier reported the team working around the clock just to get the overseas release out on schedule, and this latest admission from Singh suggests that scramble left little bandwidth for anything else.

Whether Hanuman Ansh eventually gets an India-wide multi-language release, and whether the makers push for an Oscar campaign next cycle instead, remains open. For now, the September 18 Telugu release is the next date that matters.