Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

A gritty streaming-style thriller with no mega-star, a two-crore devotional film that quietly crossed fifty, and a big-budget star vehicle that emptied out on day one — three very different box office stories are exposing what actually moves Indian audiences right now.

Three films. Three completely different outcomes. And together they say more about what Indian audiences actually want than any trade pandit press release ever could.

Start with the one nobody expected to work. Mirzapur — the film — had no mega-star anchoring it. Divyendu Sharma, Ali Fazal and the rest of the ensemble are recognisable faces from the streaming world, not opening-weekend draws in the traditional Bollywood sense. The film runs close to three hours, carries an adult certificate, doesn’t shy away from language or violence, and still pulled audiences into theatres who whistled at gunfights and stayed seated through gaali-laced dialogue. Reports circulating around the film’s numbers vary — some pegging the budget at seventy to eighty crore, others suggesting a leaner figure — but the collection figures, believed to be well past the hundred-crore mark, tell a clear story regardless of which budget number is accurate: this was not supposed to be a slam dunk, and it became one anyway.

The explanation isn’t complicated. Director Gurmmeet Singh appears to have simply extended the show’s template onto the big screen rather than reinventing it, trusting that fans of the series would follow the tone they already loved. That said, not every audience reaction has been uniform — some viewers have pointed to a first half that drags, arguing that twenty extra minutes could have been trimmed without losing anything, with the real momentum arriving once the second-half chaos — the gunfights, the confrontations — kicks in. That’s a fair critical note. A three-hour film with a slow first half is a real risk, and the fact that word of mouth carried it through anyway says something about how much goodwill the source material had already banked with viewers.

A Two-Crore Miracle

If Mirzapur’s success is explainable through fandom and format, Hanuman Anshakar is stranger. A film reportedly made on a budget of around two to three crore has, by some accounts, crossed fifty crore — and did so without a single recognisable star name attached, without a conventional marketing blitz, and without the typical opening-weekend spike. Instead, the film reportedly built its audience gradually, aided by devotional word of mouth, with the film’s own team said to have handed out pamphlets outside temples and gurdwaras during langar gatherings, appealing directly to devotees.

That’s a marketing story worth pausing on. This wasn’t a studio machine spending crores on billboards — it was a grassroots campaign built on faith and community trust, and it appears to have worked precisely because it didn’t try to compete with conventional star-driven marketing at all. Shows reportedly increased gradually, week over week, rather than declining after an opening weekend — an unusual trajectory for Indian theatrical releases, where films typically peak on day one and taper off. A film gaining momentum in its third week, rather than losing it, is genuinely rare.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a fluke, but there’s a broader signal here: devotional and faith-based cinema, made honestly rather than cynically, can generate loyalty that no marketing budget buys. It’s reportedly caught the attention of other producers — with word that additional mythological projects, including one centred on Krishna, may be in development. Whether that enthusiasm translates into similarly organic success remains to be seen; audience trust of this kind isn’t easily manufactured on demand.

When The Formula Fails

Then there’s Toxic — reportedly a big-budget, star-driven production that saw significant walkouts on its opening day, described by some as a major disappointment for its backers. Yash, reportedly linked to the film’s production, is said to have publicly acknowledged the loss and stated an intention to focus on future work rather than dwell on it — a reasonably mature response, if accurately reported, to a costly miscalculation.

The comparison being drawn by some commentators — that a KGF-level hit costing under a hundred crore is remembered for over a thousand crore in returns, while an expensive misfire is forgotten within days — is a useful reminder that budget size and audience affection don’t correlate the way studios often assume. Audiences don’t owe loyalty to a production budget. They respond to story, to characters they want to root for, to a "hero arriving to save the day" simplicity that has worked in Hindi cinema for decades, dressed up or stripped down. When a film forgets that in favour of scale, the fall can be sharp and swift, regardless of star wattage attached to it.

The Deol Question

Which brings us to Sunny Deol, whose recent run has been rockier than his admirers might like to admit. Batwara Ake, released under Aamir Khan’s production banner, reportedly struggled at the box office. Jaat, despite some claims of profitability circulating online, has been characterised by several critics as a commercial disappointment rather than a hit, and an OTT release of an older Deol project is said to have underperformed on viewership as well — undercut, in part, by premature "success celebration" narratives that didn’t match actual numbers.

Yet Deol’s professional relationship with director Rajkumar Santoshi — the filmmaker behind Ghayal, Ghatak and Damini, films that helped build Deol’s stardom in the first place — reportedly remains intact, with two further collaborations said to be in planning: a fresh story set in Banaras (not a sequel or prequel to an earlier title), and Sardar Ji 3 or a similarly titled follow-up. Add to that a reported Border 3 commitment, and the picture is of an actor betting on nostalgia and old creative partnerships rather than newer directors, on the belief — whether justified or not — that today’s filmmaking talent doesn’t match what built his career the first time.

That’s a defensible instinct up to a point. Loyalty to collaborators who understand your strengths as a performer isn’t inherently a bad strategy. But betting an entire slate — reportedly as many as eight upcoming films — on a formula from three decades ago, in a market where audience taste has visibly shifted toward leaner, writing-first storytelling, carries real risk. The danger isn’t creative loyalty. It’s repetition mistaken for reliability.

The Marketing Vacuum

Meanwhile, Akshay Kumar’s upcoming Haiwaan is arriving with strikingly little visible promotion — no major press push, no significant public appearances noted by observers, nothing resembling the marketing intensity usually associated with a Kumar release. Whether that’s a deliberate low-key strategy or simply a production still finding its footing is unclear from the outside. What’s notable is the backdrop: the production banner involved has reportedly been linked to recent box office disappointments, including Toxic and other underperforming titles, which may explain the more muted rollout — or may have nothing to do with it at all.

Studio Perspective

What connects all of this isn’t star power, budget size, or genre. It’s whether a film understands what it’s actually offering an audience and commits to that offer honestly. Mirzapur worked because it trusted its own tone rather than sanitising itself for a wider theatrical crowd. Hanuman Anshakar worked because its makers appear to have understood their audience wasn’t looking for spectacle — it was looking for sincerity, and grassroots faith-based outreach met that audience where it actually lived. Toxic, by most accounts, offered scale without a story audiences wanted to follow.

None of this is really about big stars versus small stars, or big budgets versus small ones. It’s about whether a film knows who it’s for. Sunny Deol’s upcoming slate and Haiwaan’s quiet rollout will be worth watching for exactly this reason — not whether the names attached are big enough, but whether the films underneath those names have something audiences are actually asking for.

The box office doesn’t reward ambition. It rewards clarity. That’s the harder lesson underneath all three of these stories.

— Studio CarryOnHarry Editorial Desk

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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