Indian box office turns vibrant as Marathi, Punjabi and Hollywood films take off

Whether it is Marathi’s Baipan Bhari Deva or Punjabi’s Carry On Jatta 3 or a slew of recent Hollywood hits or last year’s breakout performance of Kannada films such as Kantara and Charlie777, Indian exhibitors are seeing a kaleidoscopic mix of films from different languages drawing crowds to the multiplexes.
 
The share of Hindi language in India’s cumulative box office for January-June 2023 stood at 37 per cent, according to consultancy firm Ormax Media’s ‘India Box Office Report 2023’. Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi and other regional languages together contributed 51 per cent, while Hollywood accounted for 12 per cent.

“Hollywood and regional films have picked up in a big way,” said Nagpur-based exhibitor and distributor Akshaye Rathi, Director of Aashirwad Theatres, adding that it’s almost a three-way split between Hindi, regional languages and Hollywood now in some multiplexes. Pre-pandemic, Hindi used to account for 50-55 per cent of the box office collections, while Hollywood brought in 25 per cent and regional held 15-20 per cent share,” he noted.
 
Theatres in the Hindi speaking regions struggled to draw audience back after the pandemic as they were hooked to streaming platforms, and back-to-back Hindi film duds didn’t help matters. The only saving grace were the south Indian films along with their dubbed versions doing phenomenal business even theatrically. The fortunes of theatres, especially multiplexes, appear to have reversed since May 2023 with hits across languages. A bumper July-August with back-to-back hits has been the icing on the cake.  
 
Hollywood set the ball rolling with ten big releases since May 2023 -- Fast X, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Transformer: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash, Insidious: The Red Door, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Oppenheimer and Barbie. The last three alone, which released in July, have pulled in an estimated total Indian net collection of Rs 262 crore and counting. Regional superhits such as Malayalam’s 2018 (May 5, Rs 92 crore+), Marathi’s Baipan Bhari Deva (June 30, Rs 75 crore+), Punjabi’s Carry on Jatta 3 (June 29, Rs 45 crore+) and Telugu’s Baby (July 14, 2023, Rs 63 crore+) have peppered the past three months at the cinemas. Rajinikanth’s Tamil movie Jailer as well as Hindi’s Gadar 2 and OMG 2 made for a triple delight over the Independence Day weekend.

“Earlier, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi or Marathi films were only limited to their respective states and did not have a larger piece of the overall national box office pie. But now the Indian box office is gaining more width and depth,” said Tushar Dhingra, Founding CEO of Dhishoom Cinemas.  

Another Marathi film ‘Ved’ earned a brisk Rs 61 crore in net Indian box office collection earlier this year, while 2022’s Kannada films Kantara (Rs 300 crore+) and Charlie777 (Rs 84 crore+) earned nearly Rs 400 crore at the Indian net box office across the languages they were released in.