Emraan Hashmi’s Awarapan 2 has quietly turned into the most profitable film of his career, and a modest budget is the reason nobody saw this coming. The sequel to the 2007 cult film was made on a reported ₹45 crore, and by its tenth day at the box office on August 23, it had already generated a net profit of close to ₹97 crore — a return of roughly 215 percent, according to trade estimates from Koimoi’s box office desk.
That number matters because it puts Awarapan 2 ahead of what industry trackers call the best profit percentage of Hashmi’s two-decade career. His previous benchmark was Murder, the 2004 thriller that made him a star and delivered a reported 200 percent profit. Awarapan 2 has now gone past that mark.
The turnaround looks even sharper next to how the original performed. Awarapan, made on an ₹18 crore budget in 2007, collected only around ₹12-12.25 crore and was a commercial failure, even though it later found a second life as a satellite-TV favourite. Nearly two decades on, its sequel — on a budget two-and-a-half times bigger — has become Hashmi’s first solo ₹100 crore grosser, as per BollywoodLife’s tracking.
How the profit built up day by day
The film reportedly recovered its entire ₹45 crore budget within the first two days, helped by a ₹23.40 crore opening and a jump to nearly ₹60 crore by day two. By day five it had crossed ₹100 crore with a reported profit of around ₹60 crore. Day eight pushed profits to a reported 175 percent, and by day ten — with roughly ₹9-9.5 crore added on the second Sunday — the tally moved past 215 percent.
For Hashmi, who has spent much of the past decade in supporting or antagonist parts in films like Tiger 3 and They Call Him OG, this is being described in trade reports as the end of a ten-year wait for a clean solo hit. His last such success, per Koimoi, was Hamari Adhuri Kahani back in 2015.
What happens next will decide whether Awarapan 2 gets the “super-duper hit” tag, usually reserved for films sustaining a 200 percent-plus profit margin through the second weekend. If the current trend holds, Vishesh Films’ gamble on reviving a nearly two-decade-old underperforming franchise could end up as one of 2026’s most efficient Bollywood success stories on a rupee-for-rupee basis.
