Thamma recovered its budget and little more, and the Maddock horror universe has slipped a year

Thamma opened on Diwali 2025 as the most expensive film in Maddock's horror comedy universe. It finished modestly ahead of its budget, drew poor reviews, and the universe it was meant to accelerate has since slipped by a year.

The film was released on 21 October 2025, directed by Aditya Sarpotdar, who had made Munjya, and starring Ayushmann Khurrana and Rashmika Mandanna with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Paresh Rawal. It was written by Niren Bhatt, Suresh Mathew and Arun Falara, and runs across two timelines, present day Delhi and the ancient city of Vijayanagar.

Its budget was Rs 145 crore. Its public record, compiled from Indian box office trackers, gives Rs 147.81 crore from India and Rs 169.75 crore worldwide, making it the tenth highest grossing Hindi film of 2025.

Readers should know that this figure is contested. Koimoi reported a worldwide gross of Rs 211.81 crore and called the film a profitable venture returning about 12 per cent. Pinkvilla reported Rs 176 crore worldwide. The three numbers cannot all be right, and none of the Indian trade trackers publishes audited data or discloses its method. What is common to all of them is the shape of the result: a film that recovered its cost and did not become the event its budget implied.

Critically it was the weakest entry in the series. Rotten Tomatoes records 36 per cent positive from 11 critics with an average of 5.3 out of 10, with reviewers praising the music and visual design and objecting to the humour, the script and the near absence of horror in a horror comedy.

The universe connections worked as designed. Thamma is the fifth film in the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe after Stree, Bhediya, Munjya and Stree 2, and had been set up in Stree 2's post credit scene. Varun Dhawan reprised his Bhediya character, with further cameos from Nora Fatehi, Malaika Arora, Sathyaraj and Abhishek Banerjee. The film reached Amazon Prime Video on 16 December 2025, eight weeks after release.

On the question that dominated its promotion, whether an Indian vampire story would read as an import, the writer Niren Bhatt has been consistent. He told Indian outlets that the source is domestic, pointing to the Vikram and Betal tales of the Singhasan Battisi rather than to Western gothic fiction. The creature is a betaal rather than a vampire in the European sense.

The slate is where the consequences show. Shakti Shalini, which had been expected in December 2025 and then in early 2026, is now scheduled for 24 December 2026 with Aneet Padda, known for Saiyaara, in the lead, as Pinkvilla and Sacnilk reported. News9 reported that Bhediya 2, originally set for 14 August 2026, has moved to 4 December 2026 or into 2027, and that a further title, Chamunda, sits in the 2026 to 2027 lineup. Reports attaching Alia Bhatt to Chamunda have not been confirmed by the producers.

A shared universe depends on cadence. The audience has to still be holding the thread when the next film arrives. Maddock released four instalments between 2018 and 2024, then Thamma in October 2025, and has released none since. Its next is four months away at the earliest.

Whether that matters depends on Shakti Shalini. It is the first film in the universe built around a woman in the lead, and it opens on Christmas 2026 against whatever else claims that weekend. If it works, the gap reads as scheduling. If it does not, Thamma will look in retrospect like the point at which the universe's economics stopped supporting its ambitions: an Rs 145 crore film that needed to be a phenomenon and was only a modest success.