Anupriya Nagar says she nearly quit the industry when Hanuman Ansh dropped from 300 screens to 30 within eight days of release.
Eight days. That's how long it took for Hanuman Ansh to go from 300 screens to 30, according to producer Anupriya Nagar, who says the call came in warning that the film could be out of theatres entirely by the next day.
Nagar, just 21, is one of the producers behind the biographical drama on Neem Karoli Baba, directed by Vishal Chaturvedi and led by a cast of newcomers including Shobhinaw Satyaa and Vihaan Shedge. Speaking to Siddharth Kanan, she walked through what she describes as the film's roughest patch, the days right after release when the film had been written off as a flop.
Her distress, she says, wasn't about the money. "I wasn't disheartened because we weren't making money. I was disheartened because people weren't watching the film," she said, adding that the team couldn't figure out if devotees simply weren't turning up or were turning up and not connecting with it.
Inside the camp, the mood had turned grim enough that some were already talking exit strategy. "There were people in the team who were thinking that everything was over and that perhaps we should get a good OTT deal so that we could recover the money," Nagar recalled. She admits it pushed her close to walking away from the industry altogether. "When the film was declared a flop, I thought maybe I would pack my bags and go back to Zurich. I thought this industry was not meant for me," she said.
Instead, she went to Delhi. She met devotees and leaders, asked people to post from their own handles, did the rounds of podcasts and interviews, anything that could get word of mouth moving for a film nobody had heard of going in. Before release, she says, Hanuman Ansh had struggled to raise even modest post-production money, largely because it was seen as a small film with a first-time director and an unknown cast.
That calculation has since flipped. Bollywood Hungama reported the film's collections stood at Rs. 3.43 crore on Day 48, with its total closing in on Rs. 280 crore, a number that has turned a project once given up for dead into one of the year's talking points. Nagar says producers who passed on Hanuman Ansh have since reached out to apologise. "They said, 'You have made us realise that a small film can do so much. You have given a lesson to the industry,'" she said, adding that some have offered to back whatever she does next.
What that next project looks like isn't public yet. But after a film that survived a 30-screen scare to become a box office story the trade is still processing, whoever backs Nagar's next outing won't need convincing twice.
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.