There is a neat trick some films manage that ordinary films can't: lose money in cinemas and still come out ahead in a government ledger. Aakhri Sawal, starring Sanjay Dutt, has pulled it off.

Released on May 15, 2026, after a promotional campaign built around the RSS’s role in some of modern India’s most contested episodes, the film reportedly earned Rs 2.45 crore in its theatrical run – a number Bollywood Hungama’s box-office data files under “flop”. It reportedly cost around Rs 30 crore to make. By conventional arithmetic, that’s a loss hard to recover from.

Except Prasar Bharati doesn’t appear to have read it that way.

Copies of documents from the public broadcaster’s Content Sourcing Division, reviewed by Newslaundry, show it had spent Rs 4.28 crore on the film by June 2026, with another Rs 4.65 crore projected by March 2027 – a total outlay of Rs 8.93 crore. Prasar Bharati’s name appears in the film’s credit roll as a co-producer.

What did the money buy? Was it a stake in the film and its royalties or just a licence to stream it? Or was it something in between? This is what Prasar Bharati is yet to specify.

The numbers don’t explain themselves

The documents were submitted in August after a request from the broadcaster’s finance department. They cover expenses and earnings, and were meant to help Prasar Bharati confirm its revenue outlook for the financial year, Newslaundry has learnt.

The figure is substantial. The Content Sourcing Division’s total budget for 2026–27 stands at nearly Rs 280 crore, of which Rs 55.96 crore had been spent by June and roughly Rs 223 crore more is projected until March 2027. 

One film accounts for nearly three percent of everything the division will spend across a full year. For comparison, in the same financial year, Prasar Bharati acquired 59 Hollywood films, combined, for Rs 15 crore – roughly Rs 25 lakh a title. Aakhri Sawal cost much more than that.

Though it is worth resisting the reflex to treat “flopped at the box office” as the end of the financial story. Theatrical figures rarely capture the corporate arrangements, licensing deals and OTT payouts that increasingly cushion a film’s real economics. But that cuts both ways: if the film’s producers were always going to recover their money elsewhere, the question of what the public broadcaster’s Rs 8.93 crore was doing in the arrangement becomes sharper.