Before anyone was talking box office, Hanuman Ansh was a film nobody was sure would get finished.

According to Filmfare, Shobhinaw Satyaa signed on to Vishal Chaturvedi's devotional drama as an assistant director, not an actor. The role of Neem Karoli Baba, the spiritual leader the film is based on, went to someone else entirely. Then that actor fell seriously ill, and the production faced the very real possibility of being shelved before it even started shooting. Chaturvedi turned to Satyaa and asked him to audition for the part instead.

That's a big ask for anyone. Satyaa, per Filmfare, wasn't sure audiences would accept him in the role, and he worried separately about how Neem Karoli Baba's own followers would react to seeing him play their guru. Those are two different anxieties, and either one could sink a performance before the cameras even roll.

The casting scramble wasn't the only crisis. Filmfare reports that several cast and crew members walked off the project, convinced it would never actually reach its shooting location in Chitrakoot. Satyaa has described himself as the "last person standing" at one point, with the shoot's future genuinely in doubt. The team eventually got there by train and began filming in a town that carries real weight for anyone who knows the Ramayana, sitting along the Mandakini River, a location that ended up hosting some of the film's most important scenes.

None of that backstory was visible on August 7, when Hanuman Ansh opened to just Rs 10 lakh on its first day, running on a limited number of screens. It looked, for a moment, like the film's troubled birth might just be followed by a quiet death at the box office.

It wasn't. Word of mouth built steadily over the following weeks. Exhibitors kept adding shows as audiences kept showing up, and by the fifth week the film's India gross had pushed past Rs 150 crore, on a reported production budget of roughly Rs 2 crore.

The reaction online has been split, and that's worth saying plainly rather than pretending there's consensus. Some viewers are calling it a stack of miracle vignettes without a real spiritual arc, and more than a few have flagged a climax that doesn't earn its build-up. Others, including actor Varun Dhawan, have been vocal in praising the film. Both things can be true of a devotional drama that clearly connected with far more people than its opening day suggested.

What happens next is the more interesting question than the number on the ledger. A film that almost didn't survive its own shoot has become a case study trade circles will point to for years, on why a small crew, a spiritually significant location and a lead actor nobody originally cast can still add up to something audiences show up for, week after week, long after the opening numbers said they wouldn't.