Two paths to a hit: 'Mirzapur: The Movie' and 'Hanuman Ansh'

A housefull cinema hall in the middle of a weekday is not something one gets to see often these days. A character’s entry is met with hooting; a familiar one-liner draws applause; and when one bad guy takes on another, the audience is fully invested. That kind of unhinged theatrical experience has become increasingly rare in Hindi cinema. Yet that is precisely what Mirzapur: The Movie has managed to create.

Pankaj Tripathi is back as Mirzapur's strongman Kaleen Bhaiya, Divyendu Sharma as his mostly useless son Munna, Ali Fazal as Guddu, and Rasika Dugal as the fiery Beena Tripathi. Jitendra Kumar joins the cast as Bablu.

Released on September 4, the film has already crossed ₹150 crore in India and ₹200 crore worldwide, turning a hit OTT property into a box-office success.

While the Mirzapur universe and its larger-than-life characters were already familiar to audiences—Season 3, released in 2024, clocked 30 million views—another sleeper hit is rewriting the box-office rulebook.

Made on a modest budget of ₹2 crore, Hanuman Ansh was all but written off by its second week, when it had earned less than ₹1.5 crore. Yet, the film has since turned into a box-office phenomenon, grossing ₹205.15 crore worldwide, according to entertainment data platform Sacnilk.

Two paths to a hit

The two films could not be more distinct, and neither could their trajectories.

One, set in the violent Purvanchal underworld, exploded at the box office from the day of its release. Directed by Gurmeet Singh and produced by Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar, Mirzapur: The Movie recorded a ₹93.75 crore net opening weekend before crossing ₹148 crore in net earnings in its first week in India.

While Mirzapur was already a major OTT IP, the real test was whether it could persuade audiences to leave their homes and pay to watch something they could simply stream at home. Its box-office performance has answered that question. The popularity of a streaming franchise can translate into theatrical demand, further nullifying the cinema vs OTT debate. It would also be interesting to see if more OTT properties would leap to the big screen.

Hanuman Ansh, meanwhile, has become an extraordinary box-office phenomenon. Directed by Vishal Chaturvedi and based on the life of Hindu saint Neem Karoli Baba, the film has been driven almost entirely by word of mouth.

The numbers tell the story. It had a modest theatrical opening, earning ₹1.08 crore in its first week and just ₹40 lakh in its second. It exploded in its third and fourth weeks, earning ₹10.40 crore and ₹61 crore, respectively.

One might have expected the momentum to taper off in the fifth week. Instead, the film collected ₹49.25 crore over its fifth weekend, covering days 29 to 31—more than either Dhurandhar film managed at the same point in its run. The original Dhurandhar collected ₹33.25 crore in its fifth weekend, while Dhurandhar 2 earned ₹12.55 crore.

What makes Hanuman Ansh extraordinary, therefore, is not just the scale of its eventual run but the trajectory itself: an audience that kept growing weeks after release and continued to show up even in its fifth week.

Both films are box-office successes, but their journeys could hardly be more different. One is a highly anticipated action franchise with a ready-made audience; the other is a low-budget, unexpected spiritual story that built its audience almost entirely through word of mouth.

Yet, they have one crucial thing in common: neither relies on conventional Bollywood star power. There is no A-list Hindi film star at the centre of either film, challenging an industry formula in which a big name is often considered essential to driving audiences to theatres.

The A-lister formula

The A-listers, meanwhile, appear to be having a difficult run. Priyadarshan’s Haiwaan, starring Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan, hit the big screen on September 11, but has had a muted start, earning just ₹4.06 crore in net collections by its second day.

Meanwhile, Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, Yash’s much-anticipated theatrical return after KGF: Chapter 2, opened to a whopping ₹101.10 crore net in India on August 26. But its momentum has almost completely faded—by the end of its second week, the film was collecting less than ₹50 lakh a day.

“What makes Toxic's week two remarkable isn't just that it's small—every film cools off in its second week—it's how little was left to cool,” noted Sacnilk.

“The box office is telling us all a story if we watch carefully,” filmmaker Anubhav Sinha pointed out.

“Mirzapur and Hanuman Ansh are not freak hits. It is easy to draw simplistic conclusions, and dangerous too,” he wrote on X.