Vishal Chaurvedi’s devotional film Hanuman Ansh, the biopic of Neem Karoli Baba, has witnessed what’s been hailed as a “box office miracle”. While the film started slow earlier this month, it has recorded a massive upsurge during its fourth weekend, with its earnings on the fourth Sunday even surpassing the combined earnings of the first three weeks at the domestic box office.

Made on a modest budget of less than Rs 2 crore, Hanuman Ansh has earned Rs 47.33 crore gross and Rs 40.13 crore at the domestic box office, at a 30% occupancy rate. Thus, it’s already earned more than 20 times its budget. The sleeper hit’s majority of earnings came not from its opening week, but from its fourth week.

Hanuman Ansh’s massive comeback on fourth weekend

On Sunday (day 24) at the domestic box office, Hanuman Ansh amassed Rs 12.75 crore across 5,363 screens, as per Sacnilk. This is the first time the film has crossed the Rs 10 crore mark within a single day across its four-week-plus run so far. It earned only a couple of crores less than what the new tentpole release — Geethu Mohandas and Yash’s Kannada action thriller Toxic: A Fairytale for Grownups, earned on Sunday in its dubbed Hindi version (Rs 14.50 crore).

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Hanuman Ansh also surpassed on Sunday, by a huge margin, holdover tentpole releases like Nitin Kakkar’s action thriller Awarapan 2 (Rs 1.40 crore), starring Emraan Hashmi, and Rajkumar Santoshi’s Partition drama Batwara 1947, starring Sunny Deol, which released on August 14, a week after Hanuman Ansh did on August 7.

The fourth Sunday earnings of Hanuman Ansh, Rs 12.75 crore, are more than Rs 11.90 crore, the total money earned by the film within the first three weeks. On its fourth Saturday (day 23), the film inched closer to the Rs 10 crore mark, by garnering Rs 9.25 crore across 4,137 screens. That was also a significant rise from its fourth Friday (day 22) earnings of Rs 6.25 crore from 2,829 screens.

Hanuman Ansh is a historic sleeper hit

Hanuman Ansh started very slow, opening at only Rs 10 lakh on August 7. Throughout the next 15 days, it remained in the range between Rs 4 lakh (second Friday) and Rs 30 lakh (first Sunday). In fact, after garnering Rs 1.08 crore in the opening week, it slipped down to Rs 40 lakh in the second week. However, week 3 turned out to be the redemption, earning Rs 10.40 crore

The surge in the domestic box office collection of Hanuman Ansh was noticed in its third week, when it registered an exponential increase of 2500%. Before earning almost thrice as much on its fourth Friday, the film ended its week 3 run by garnering Rs 2.10 crore on its third Thursday (day 21) across 1,294 screens.

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Throughout the third week, the box office range of Hanuman Ansh operated from Rs 15 lakh to Rs 2.35 crore. After staying within lakhs for the first 16 days, the film finally breached the Rs 1 crore mark on its third Sunday (day 17) by earning more than twice of that, at Rs 2.20 crore from only 488 screens. The number of shows also increased by its fourth weekend after the impressive uptick in its collection across week 3.

What’s Hanuman Ansh about?

The film takes place in 20th century India, when Lakshman Das, 13, abandons his hometown of Braj after his mother’s demise. He then undergoes a deeply spiritual journey, which leads to him becoming the spiritual guru Neem Karoli Baba. Since he’s a devotee of Lord Hanuman, he’s often referred to as ‘Hanuman Ansh’, translating to the ‘essence of Hanuman’.