Indian cinema is having an interesting week at the box office. Three very different films are competing for the audience’s attention, and together they are showing that the theatrical market is not moving in one direction.
There is Mirzapur: The Movie, a big-screen extension of one of India’s most recognisable streaming franchises. There is Hanuman Ansh, a small devotional film that arrived without the usual noise around a major release and has now turned into one of the year’s biggest surprises.
Then there is Toxic, the Yash-led action drama that opened with the kind of numbers normally associated with a major event film but has seen its momentum slow sharply after the opening week.
What makes the picture interesting is that these films are not competing for exactly the same audience. They represent three different ways of getting people into theatres, and the results suggest that familiarity alone may not be enough to keep a film running once the opening excitement fades.
Mirzapur: The Movie had perhaps the easiest advantage to understand. The audience already knew the world, the characters and the tone. The Prime Video series had built a strong following before the film arrived in theatres, so the movie did not have to introduce itself from scratch.
That advantage has shown up at the box office. The film opened on September 4 and has recorded about ₹72 crore in India net over its first weekend according to current box-office tracking, with its worldwide gross reported at around ₹90 crore. The Sunday figure was lower than the opening day, which is not unusual for a film that arrives with a heavy first-day fan turnout.
But the more interesting question is whether Mirzapur can hold that audience after the initial rush. A franchise can bring people to the theatre once because they want to see familiar characters on a bigger screen. What keeps a film alive for the second and third weekend is usually something else. Word of mouth has to take over.
That is where Hanuman Ansh has produced a very different story.
The film, based on the life of Neem Karoli Baba, started almost quietly on August 7. It opened on only a small number of screens and had very little of the conventional publicity that usually surrounds a film hoping to become a theatrical hit. Yet its audience grew instead of disappearing.
By September 6, Hanuman Ansh had crossed the ₹100 crore mark in India after a remarkable turnaround. Current trade reporting puts its India net collection at around ₹100.20 crore, with the film reaching that figure in its fifth weekend.
That is the part of the story that deserves more attention than the ₹100 crore headline itself. The film did not arrive as an obvious blockbuster. Its first week was extremely modest, but audiences kept talking about it and the numbers began moving in the opposite direction from what normally happens to a small release. Instead of falling away after the opening weekend, it found more viewers as the weeks went by.
That kind of growth is difficult to manufacture. Advertising can create curiosity, stars can create an opening and a franchise can bring an established fan base into theatres. But a film that starts with almost no noise and then expands through word of mouth is doing something different.
Toxic sits somewhere between those two stories.
Yash’s film opened on August 26 with a huge first day and quickly became one of the biggest theatrical releases of the year. It has now crossed ₹243 crore in India net and around ₹334 crore worldwide according to current tracking figures.
Those numbers are strong, but the shape of the run has changed considerably. After the massive opening, daily collections dropped into much smaller numbers and the film is now facing stronger competition from Mirzapur: The Movie and Hanuman Ansh.
That does not make Toxic a failure. Far from it. A film crossing ₹300 crore worldwide within its theatrical run is still a major commercial result. But the contrast between its opening and its later performance tells us something about how quickly an audience can move on when the first wave of excitement passes.
The film’s English version also began its Indian theatrical run on September 4, several days after the other language versions. Toxic was released in Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, while the English version arrived later with a shorter cut.
Looking at all three films together, the box office seems to be rewarding different things at different stages.
Mirzapur has the power of a familiar universe. Toxic has the scale of a star-driven event film. Hanuman Ansh has something neither of them had at the beginning: the slow build of audience trust.
That does not mean audiences have suddenly stopped caring about stars or franchises. The numbers clearly show otherwise. What it does suggest is that the theatrical audience can still surprise the industry when a film connects strongly enough with a particular group of viewers.
There is also a lesson here for the way films are marketed. The old formula of creating a huge opening and then hoping the film survives is becoming harder to rely on. The first weekend still matters enormously, but the films that stay alive need people to talk about them after they leave the theatre.
Hanuman Ansh is the clearest example of that right now. Its success did not arrive in one dramatic weekend. It built slowly, almost quietly, and then became impossible to ignore.
For Mirzapur, the next test is whether the franchise can turn its opening fan rush into sustained theatrical interest. For Toxic, the challenge is to keep enough screens and audiences through the coming weeks despite the arrival of new competition. And for Hanuman Ansh, the challenge is almost the opposite: the film has already done what very few expected, and now it has to see how far this unusual run can go.
The three films may eventually end up with very different box-office totals. But for the moment, they are telling one useful story together.
Indian audiences still want stars. They still want familiar franchises. But they are also willing to discover something they were not necessarily looking for.
Sometimes the biggest surprise at the box office is not the film that arrives with the loudest opening. It is the one people keep telling each other to watch.
