New Delhi, Aug 25: Hanuman Ansh has pulled off the kind of third weekend that trade circles do not see very often. The devotional drama, which opened on August 7 with almost no buzz around it, collected Rs 3.20 crore between Friday and Sunday, taking its India net total to Rs 4.55 crore in 17 days. In gross terms that works out to Rs 5.36 crore.
The subject of the film explains part of the pull. Neem Karoli Baba, known to followers as Maharaj ji, has a constituency that runs well past India. Steve Jobs travelled to India in 1974 hoping to meet him, only to arrive months after the saint had left his body in Vrindavan, and Mark Zuckerberg told a town hall with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 that it was Jobs who sent him to a temple in India when Facebook was going through its worst phase. Julia Roberts has said a photograph of Maharaj ji started her on the path to Hinduism, while Jack Dorsey and eBay co founder Jeff Skoll have both made the trip to his Kainchi Dham ashram in the Kumaon hills.
The daily break up tells the story. Friday brought in Rs 15 lakh. Saturday moved up to Rs 87 lakh. Sunday, the film’s biggest day of the run so far, closed at Rs 2.18 crore, more than double what it had managed across Friday and Saturday put together.
Set that against the opening fortnight and the shift becomes clearer. Hanuman Ansh did Rs 89 lakh in Week 1 across roughly 200 screens, then fell to Rs 46 lakh in Week 2 as the count dropped to 40. Weekend 3 is a jump of close to 596 per cent over that second week figure.
The screens have followed the audience rather than the other way round. Exhibitors have brought the film back to about 400 screens, double what it had in its opening week, after the holds in week two suggested there was demand the release had not tapped.
Trade analyst Taran Adarsh, who has been tracking the film, has pointed to weak occupancies through the first two weeks and flagged Weekend 3 as the real turnaround, crediting the word of mouth that built up around the title.
Much of that push has come from audiences themselves. Viewers have been recommending the film to family and neighbours, and community groups in several cities have been booking shows on their own, which is what brought the extra screens back into play.
The trade has seen this pattern before with devotional cinema. Laalo Krishna Sada Sahaayate stayed quiet for the better part of a month last year before turning into a genuine run, and Hanuman Ansh is now tracking a similar curve. What makes the third weekend more striking is the company it kept, with Awarapan 2 holding well and advance bookings for Toxic already building.
Vishal Chaturvedi, who has written and directed the film, said the run has been built without a marketing spend behind it.
“Whatever marketing we had ran its course in the first few days after release. Everything that has happened since then has happened because somebody watched the film and told somebody else to watch it,” he said. “The devotee base is a large one and they have carried it into their own circles. But devotees will only promote something if the content is good enough. If the film had not held up, no amount of goodwill would have brought us a third weekend like this.” “The devotee base is a large one and they have carried it into their own circles. But devotees will only promote something if the content is good enough. If the film had not held up, no amount of goodwill would have brought us a third weekend like this.”
Hanuman Ansh, written and directed by Vishal Chaturvedi and starring Chandan Anand and Shobhinaw Satyaa, is based on the life of Neem Karoli Baba. With the screen count restored and momentum on its side, the fourth week will decide whether a film written off as a disaster in its first fortnight ends up in profit.