Six Sundays in, and Hanuman Ansh is still growing. The devotional drama collected Rs 22.50 crore net in India on Day 38, September 13, a 21.6 percent jump over the previous day's Rs 18.50 crore, according to Sacnilk figures cited by trade outlets. That single day's haul is more than eleven times the film's entire reported production budget of Rs 2 crore.

The film's India net collection now stands at Rs 214.63 crore, with the India gross at Rs 253.55 crore. Add the overseas gross of Rs 14.50 crore, boosted by a Rs 5 crore addition on Day 38 after the film's global rollout on September 11, and Hanuman Ansh has crossed Rs 268 crore worldwide.

That puts it behind only Dhurandhar 2 and Border 2 on the list of 2026's highest-grossing Hindi films, which is a strange sentence to write about a movie with no marquee star and a budget that wouldn't cover the catering on most studio productions.

A Slow Burn That Kept Burning

Directed by Vishal Chaturvedi and headlined by Shobhinaw Satyaa, Hanuman Ansh released on August 7 to a muted opening, earning roughly Rs 10 crore across its first three weeks. Nobody was predicting a blockbuster run at that point. What followed was word-of-mouth doing what marketing budgets couldn't, with collections climbing week over week instead of the usual post-opening fade.

The comparisons trade outlets have been drawing tell their own story. Hanuman Ansh's single-day numbers now dwarf what Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan's Haiwaan managed on its third day, Rs 1.85 crore, and comfortably outpaced Mirzapur: The Movie's Day 10 figure of Rs 13.25 crore. For a film with zero star power, that's the kind of arithmetic that makes distributors sit up.

The Man Behind The Film

Hanuman Ansh traces the journey of a grieving young Lakshmi Narayan, who sets out searching for meaning after his mother's death and eventually becomes the saint Neem Karoli Baba, whose teachings on service and compassion drew followers across North India and beyond.

Neem Karoli Baba's own following stretches well past religious circles. Steve Jobs is said to have travelled to India in 1974 looking for him, and Mark Zuckerberg later visited Kainchi Dham, the ashram tied to the saint, reportedly on Jobs's advice during a rough patch. In India, Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma have been among the most visible devotees to make the pilgrimage there.

Whether that cultural pull is driving repeat viewings or first-timers showing up six weeks late is hard to untangle from the numbers alone. But with the overseas run barely three days old and still adding crores by the Sunday, Hanuman Ansh isn't done climbing yet. The next marker to watch is whether it can hold its Monday numbers, which is usually where word-of-mouth hits gets tested for real.