Haiwaan opens against two incumbents and a comparison it cannot avoid
Priyadarshan’s remake of Oppam sold 44,000 advance tickets. Early reviews praise Akshay Kumar and call the film a straight copy.
Haiwaan, the Priyadarshan action thriller pairing Akshay Kumar with Saif Ali Khan, reached cinemas on Friday with an advance sale of ₹2.76 crore and early reviews that praise its lead performance while calling the film a straight copy of the Malayalam original it remakes.
The film is a Hindi remake of Oppam, which starred Mohanlal. It is Saif's first collaboration with Priyadarshan, and reunites him with Akshay after a long gap — the pair previously worked together on Yeh Dillagi, Main Khiladi Tu Anari and Tashan.
The early verdict
The reviews arriving on release day are split in a particular way: warm about the performance, cool about the film's originality.
Early reviews say Akshay Kumar is terrific but that the film is a complete copy of Oppam, while others have called it a captivating thriller.
That tension is the standard problem of the Hindi remake of a successful southern film. Oppam was built around Mohanlal in a role that carried the picture, and a remake has to decide whether to reproduce what worked or to rebuild it for a different star and a different audience. Reproducing it faithfully protects the plot and exposes the comparison.
An unpromising advance
The commercial position going in is not strong.
Haiwaan sold around 44,000 tickets in advance, collecting ₹2.76 crore including block seats. In Maharashtra the figure was ₹44 lakh including block seats, and in the Delhi-NCR region ₹47 lakh, also including block seats.
The phrase "including block seats" matters when reading those numbers. Every advance figure the Indian Express gives — the national total and both regional ones — is stated as including block seats, so none of them is a clean count of individual filmgoers.
For two stars of this standing, 44,000 tickets is a modest number to open on.
The competition it walked into
The release date is the harder problem, because Haiwaan is the third film fighting for the same screens.
Mirzapur: The Movie, which opened a week earlier on 4 September, is still dominating. It took ₹10.55 crore on its seventh day, bringing its worldwide total to ₹212.44 crore, according to trade tracker Sacnilk.
Hanuman Ansh, a devotional drama that has been in cinemas for over a month and become a surprise hit, is also holding firm. It collected ₹10 crore on its 35th day, has reached ₹192.75 crore, and went into global release on the same day as Haiwaan.
Two incumbents each taking ₹10 crore a day leaves less room than a new release normally expects. Exhibitors allocate screens to what is selling, and both of those films are still selling.
The casting order
One detail about how the film came together has emerged from Saif Ali Khan himself: in an earlier conversation with Gulf News, he said he had been cast before Akshay.
That is a small thing with a bearing on how the film reads. In Oppam, the picture belonged to Mohanlal. A remake cast around Saif first, with Akshay arriving afterwards, suggests a different balance was intended — and early reviews singling out Akshay's performance suggest the balance may have landed elsewhere again.
How the villain was cast
The casting story, as Saif told Gulf News, explains the film's shape. He was cast first, as the protagonist. Priyadarshan then struggled to find a formidable villain — the actors he approached wanted changes to the script. He mentioned the problem to Akshay during the shoot of Bhoot Bangla, and Akshay offered to play the negative role himself.
An actor volunteering for the antagonist in a friend's film is not the usual route to a performance, and it may be why the early notices single him out. One reviewer, giving the film 3.5 stars, wrote that "Akshay Kumar transforms into a full-time Haiwaan" in a psychologically demanding role with dark shades, and said the opening and climax were where he steals the film.
The same review praised the cinematography, the background score and the second half's cat-and-mouse sequences, noted a Cape Fear quality to the storyline, and described Saif's work as decent with emotional depth to his character.
What the weekend decides
Friday's advance tells you little on its own. Hindi films with modest openings have recovered on the strength of Saturday and Sunday walk-ins, and the film on the same screens that has taken ₹192.75 crore is the proof — it opened at ₹10 lakh.
But Hanuman Ansh had five weeks of empty calendar to build in. Haiwaan does not: it arrives into a market where two films are already absorbing the audience, and its review consensus gives the undecided filmgoer a reason to watch Oppam instead.
The question for the trade is whether a faithful remake can still open on star presence alone when the original is a search away — and whether "Akshay Kumar is terrific" is enough of a recommendation to fill seats that two other films are currently occupying.
