Here is a sentence nobody in Mumbai would have written two years ago: the devotional film is outperforming the streaming-IP action franchise.
Hanuman Ansh has crossed ₹300 crore worldwide. It is in week seven. It is still holding.
The Week reported the film at day 39 as the third highest-grossing Hindi film of 2026, behind only Dhurandhar 2 and Border 2, with worldwide collections approaching the ₹300 crore mark. India.com subsequently reported the film crossing ₹300 crore worldwide and specifically outpacing Mirzapur: The Movie, the month’s biggest new Hindi release.
UNI India independently reported the film’s ranking among the year’s highest grossers. The film is built around Neem Karoli Baba, the Uttarakhand-based saint whose following extends well beyond India.
The run profile is the striking part. Koimoi’s tracking has the film netting around ₹5 crore on its seventh Friday and approaching a seventh-week box office record. Films do not normally do that. A typical Hindi release does most of its business in the first ten days and then falls off a cliff. This one is behaving like a word-of-mouth phenomenon that has not finished spreading.
Indian devotional cinema is not new. It is, in fact, where Indian cinema started: Raja Harishchandra in 1913 was a mythological. For most of the studio era, devotionals and mythologicals were a reliable commercial staple.
Then they became unfashionable, got pushed to television, and largely disappeared from the theatrical mainstream for thirty years.
The last two years have reversed that comprehensively. Mahavatar Narsimha became India’s highest-grossing animated film on a mythological premise and crossed ₹300 crore worldwide. Hanuman Ansh has now, per Koimoi’s reporting, surpassed it to become Bollywood’s highest-grossing devotional film.
The common factor is an audience that the industry had stopped counting: viewers in smaller cities and towns who go to the cinema as a family, often not weekly, and who turn out in enormous numbers for the right film.
Confirmed by independent outlets: Hanuman Ansh has crossed ₹300 crore worldwide; it ranks as the third highest-grossing Hindi film of 2026 behind Dhurandhar 2 and Border 2; it is based on Neem Karoli Baba; it maintained strong collections into its seventh week; it outpaced Mirzapur: The Movie.
Not confirmed: budget, and therefore profitability multiple. Also unconfirmed are the detailed admission figures that would separate genuine footfalls from price-driven growth.
The Hindi film industry has spent five years diagnosing its own problem and mostly getting it wrong. The received wisdom was that audiences had moved to streaming, that the star system was broken, and that only spectacle could pull people out of their homes.
Hanuman Ansh suggests a different reading: the audience never left, the films stopped being made for them. A devotional film with a clear emotional proposition, made at a sane budget, found a market that nobody was serving.
The commercial logic is now impossible to ignore. Two ₹300 crore devotional grossers in consecutive years is not a fluke, it is a category. Expect the 2027 and 2028 Hindi slates to reflect that, and expect a wave of projects announced on exactly this template within months.
There is a caution attached. Genres that get discovered in India tend to get flooded, and the third or fourth imitation usually kills the run.
It is worth separating two things that often get merged in coverage of this trend: religious sentiment and good filmmaking.
A devotional film does not succeed because the audience is devout. Plenty of devotional films have failed. It succeeds when it gives that audience a film worth the ticket, and the two recent breakouts both had strong craft behind them.
The other context is exhibition. These films perform disproportionately in single screens and smaller-town multiplexes, which is precisely the segment the industry has spent a decade neglecting. A category that fills those screens is not just a genre trend, it is a lifeline for a part of the exhibition business that has been struggling.
BENGALURU BAATH TAKE
Every few years Hindi cinema rediscovers an audience it forgot it had and acts amazed. This is that, again. The number to focus on is not ₹300 crore, it is the seventh Friday, because a film still earning ₹5 crore forty-plus days in is a film that people are recommending to each other, which is the only marketing that has ever actually worked. Our worry is what comes next. Somewhere in Mumbai right now, twelve identical devotional projects are being greenlit by people who have learned the genre and not the lesson. The lesson was never the genre. It was that the audience shows up when someone makes something for them.
SOURCES & VERIFICATION
Verification status: CONFIRMED · Independent confirming sources: 5
- 1. The Week — https://www.theweek.in/news/entertainment/2026/09/15/hanuman-ansh-box-office-day-39-collection-record.html
Confirms: Day 39 status as third highest-grossing Hindi film of 2026 behind Dhurandhar 2 and Border 2; worldwide collection nearing ₹300 crore. - 2. India.com — https://www.india.com/entertainment/bollywood/hanuman-ansh-box-office-collection-neem-karoli-baba-film-crosses-rs-300-crore-worldwide-devotional-film-outpaces-mirzapur-the-movie-8526246/
Confirms: Crossing of ₹300 crore worldwide and outpacing Mirzapur: The Movie; Neem Karoli Baba subject. - 3. UNI India — https://www.uniindia.com/entertainment/ent-maha-hanuman-ansh-highest-grossing-film/185059
Confirms: Independent news agency confirmation of the film’s ranking among 2026’s highest grossers. - 4. Koimoi — https://www.koimoi.com/
Confirms: Seventh-Friday collection of around ₹5 crore and the film surpassing Mahavatar Narsimha as Bollywood’s highest-grossing devotional film. - 5. Wikipedia — Hanuman Ansh — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanuman_Ansh
Confirms: Compiled film details and box office record.
