Sometimes the biggest miracles in cinema happen when nobody is looking. When Hanuman Ansh arrived in theatres on August 7, hardly anybody was looking.
Made for a reported Rs 2 crore, without a conventional Bollywood superstar and with none of the publicity machinery that accompanies big-ticket releases, it opened to a mere Rs 10 lakh.
By the arithmetic of the film industry, that was not an opening. It was almost an obituary. Fifty days later, the requiem has turned into a celebration.
Hanuman Ansh has completed 50 days in cinemas with Rs 292 crore net and Rs 345 crore gross from India, Rs 37 crore from overseas and a staggering Rs 381 crore worldwide, according to Sacnilk.
Day 50 alone contributed Rs 3.35 crore net from 3,767 shows. From Rs 10 lakh on Day One to Rs 381 crore in 50 days. Now that is what I would call a box-office miracle.
The audience nobody saw coming
What happened in between is more interesting than the final number. For the first two weeks, Hanuman Ansh looked every bit like a film that would disappear quietly.
Then something clicked. People who had watched it began talking about it. Those who heard about it went to see it. And those who liked it did something far more valuable than posting a review – they brought somebody else along.
The film’s theatrical footprint expanded dramatically. What started with just 355 shows eventually ran into thousands. And the audience kept coming.
By the seventh week, the film was collecting numbers that most films would be happy to see in their opening weekend. Week Seven alone brought in Rs 45 crore net in India, trade reports said.
That is the thing about word of mouth. It doesn’t arrive with a media plan. It simply travels from one person to another. And sometimes it travels faster than advertising.
Grosses 191 times its production cost
The arithmetic is almost comic. The film made has now grossed nearly 191 times its production cost. Put another way, the worldwide gross represents a return of about 18,968%. Mind-boggling.
The film has done what hundreds of crores spent on production and publicity cannot guarantee: it has found an audience.
Karoli Baba’s blessing?
Hanuman Ansh, written and directed by Vishal Chaturvedi, is based on the life, teachings and reported miracles of 20th-century spiritual figure Neem Karoli Baba.
That gives the film something most expensive productions cannot buy: an audience that already has an emotional or spiritual connection with its subject.
But that alone cannot explain a run of this magnitude. Devotional films have been made before. Spiritual subjects have come and gone. Not all of them have turned into box-office phenomena.
Something about Hanuman Ansh appears to have connected with its audience strongly enough to keep bringing people into theatres. Call it faith. Call it word of mouth. Call it the Karoli Baba effect.
Or, if you prefer the language of the box office, call it an extraordinary audience response. Whatever the explanation, the numbers are doing the talking.
A mighty devotional wonder
And that brings us to another film Bollywood might want to remember. In 1975, while the industry was preparing for the arrival of what would become one of Indian cinema’s biggest blockbusters, Sholay, a tiny devotional film called Jai Santoshi Maa quietly entered theatres.
It had none of the glamour of Sholay. No Amitabh Bachchan. No Dharmendra. No Hema Malini. No Sanjeev Kumar. No Salim-Javed. No Ramesh Sippy. No R. D. Burman or Helen and ‘Mehbooba mehbooba…’ And certainly nothing resembling the scale on which Sholay was mounted.
Jai Santoshi Maa was made on a shoestring budget and initially struggled to find an audience. Yet it went on to become one of the great sleeper hits of its time. And that is where the parallel with Hanuman Ansh becomes irresistible.
When Sholay met Jai Santoshi Maa
Sholay represented everything the Hindi film industry associated with a big event film – stars, scale, technology, spectacle and a huge production investment.
Jai Santoshi Maa represented almost the opposite. Yet both found their audiences. That is the point worth remembering. A film does not have to look expensive to feel valuable to the person sitting in the theatre.
And that brings us back to Hanuman Ansh. It arrived opposite much bigger films, including Yash-starrer Toxic. Its own producers have admitted that they never expected the film to survive even a day against such competition. Yet it survived. Then it grew. Then it exploded.
Money can buy scale, not success
The lesson isn’t that big-budget films are bad or that stars don’t matter. Of course they matter. A star can bring people to the theatre on the first day. A huge production can create anticipation. Expensive technology can produce spectacular images. Marketing can make sure that everybody knows a film exists.
But none of these can guarantee that people will like what they see. The audience doesn’t see the balance sheet projected on the screen.
It sees the story. It feels the emotion. It responds to the characters. It laughs, cries, gets goosebumps, feels inspired — or simply walks out wondering what all the fuss was about.
And when the audience genuinely connects, something magical happens: the audience becomes the marketing department. That is precisely what seems to have happened with Hanuman Ansh.
The real star is the connection
The film industry’s obsession with opening-day numbers sometimes makes us forget a rather basic fact about cinema.
A film is not a product that can be sold entirely through packaging. You can create curiosity. You can create hype. You can create a huge opening.
But you cannot manufacture affection. That has to come from the audience. And affection is particularly powerful in a film based on faith.
A viewer who feels spiritually moved is not merely consuming entertainment. He or she may feel compelled to share the experience.
‘You must watch this.’
Those five words can do what a hundred hoardings cannot. There is something deliciously ‘toxic’ about the whole story. The film that nobody expected to succeed has completed 50 days.
The film made for a fraction of the budgets commanded by today’s big productions has become one of the year’s great box-office surprises.
And it has demonstrated that the audience still retains one power that no spreadsheet can predict: the power to surprise. Perhaps that is the most enduring lesson of Hanuman Ansh – and, before it, Jai Santoshi Maa.
You can spend hundreds of crores making a film. You can assemble stars. You can build enormous sets. You can employ the finest technicians. You can market the film from morning till night.
But when the lights go down and the screen comes alive, the audience is still sitting there with the final vote.
And sometimes the audience decides to make a little film very, very big. Perhaps Neem Karoli Baba would simply smile and say: ‘Why are you surprised?’
