₹13,000 Crore and Counting: Why 2025 has been the best post-pandemic year for Indian films
What Really Drove Indian Cinema’s ₹13,000 Crore Comeback in 2025
In this episode of The Media Room, host Vanita Kohli-Kandekar sits down with Shailesh Kapoor, Founder and CEO of Ormax Media, to decode what the numbers really say about Indian cinema in 2025. Drawing from the Ormax Box Office Report, the conversation unpacks a landmark year that saw the domestic box office cross ₹13,000 crore for the first time ever, alongside a sharp resurgence of Hindi cinema and a healthier, multi-genre mix of successful films.
They discuss why footfalls are falling even as revenues rise, how rising ticket prices and “event films” are reshaping movie-going habits, and what’s behind the stagnation in parts of South Indian cinema. The episode also explores the surprise growth of Gujarati cinema, the growing importance of franchise films, why audience habits have weakened post-pandemic, and how OTT has emerged as a parallel national market even as theatrical cinema remains language-driven.
The conversation further examines whether India truly functions as one national box office, why Hollywood has become the most pan-Indian theatrical player, and what these shifts mean for the future of film production, distribution and audience behaviour in India.
NOTE: This transcript is done by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on feedback@thecore.in.
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TRANSCRIPT
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Hello and welcome to the media room and happy new year to all my viewers and listeners. You know every year, Aumax Media comes out with its annual box office report. This year it came out with the report or at least gave me the figures in advance a couple of days back and we analysed it and this is an exclusive access that the media room got to the box office report before it's released to the public and the numbers are very interesting and to break them down I have with me Shailesh Kapoor who's a co-founder and managing director for Aumax Media.
There are two or three things he highlights as he unpacks the data. One, the box office has finally crossed that Rubicon you know that jinxed number of 11 to 12,000 crore. It's now the Indian box office is about 13,000 crore in ticket sales.
Secondly, Gujarati cinema for some reason has tripled in share. It's doing amazingly well. Malayalam holds solid.
It hasn't risen but it holds solid at the number it it doubled in 2024 and it holds solid there. The biggest surprise to my mind was the fact that we there is except for Kuli there is not a single Tamil or Telugu film in the top 30 list which is somewhat disappointing because the south has done very well in the top charts over the last few years. Over to Shailesh to break down the report for you and to take you through the finer points of it but just one note to all my viewers that this is a report about box office data which is which is the based on ticket sales for a film.
It does not mean that this is the size of the Indian film business. You have to add TV revenues, streaming revenues, overseas box office and a whole lot of other things before you arrive at the size of the Indian film business. So you know when we say 13,000 crore you add in other revenues the Indian film business is 21,000 odd crore.
That's just a little thing I need you to keep in mind because we always confuse box office numbers with size of the business. Box office only reflects ticket sales that's all. Hi Shailesh, welcome for the second time to the media room and in exactly one year.
Yes. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Shailesh Kapoor: Thank you for having me.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: You know you were kind enough to give me an exclusive look at the Ormax box office report for 2025 and you have discussed this. I think some of the numbers are really startling, some of them are interesting, some of them are disappointing. I just want you to first unpack the report a bit for my audience and then we take specifics from that and discuss it.
Shailesh Kapoor: So the report is essentially capturing the domestic box office in India in the year 2025 which includes films which release in 2025, some of which continue to run in theatres. So for those films also we have estimated the whatever collections are left. The first major highlight is that it's the first year ever to a gross of 13,000 crore.
While they have been 12,000 crore cost in 2023 two years ago, last year was short of that number by around 500 crore but 13,000 has never been touched and this number is almost a thousand crore higher than the previous record which was 2023. What is also interesting is that there has been a fairly good resurgence of Hindi cinema which was you know in the last three four years has been a bit of a punching bag as far as theatrical is concerned because south has been taking the line right. Last year it was Malayalam, before that it has been Tamil Telugu.
Hindi cinema 18 percent growth but I was actually looking at more specific numbers in the full report and if you exclude the south dubbed versions from the Hindi collections the growth is actually 59 percent. So the 18 percent growth is because last year there was Pushpa 2 which was the Hindi version did very well but if you look at original Hindi language films the growth is even higher it's on it's like 59 percent is almost like you know like a fundamental change in how Hindi cinema is performing as far as the Hindi film industry based out of Bombay is concerned and within that the films that have done well are fairly multi-genre. So there is Dhurandav which is a gangster spy thriller which is not the conventional larger than life action film but a more realistic kind of a film. There is Shawa which is a historical biopic with action.
There is Sayara which is a proper pure romantic film. So we've seen that it's a multi-genre thing compared to 2023 where four big films did well Animal and Gadar 2 but they were primarily at least three of them were in the action space but now we have seen that the genre mix is much healthier even in some of the other languages the top films are from a variety of genres as this Telugu film Sankranti Ki Vastunam if I pronounced that right in it came in January last year which is a family comedy which has done very well and it's not an action film at all in the conventional sense. So we are seeing a lot of that. Hollywood has recovered very well this year because all the headwinds that were there because of the writer's strike are now gone and seems like that's a category which is back to its pre-pandemic levels which again is great because it there was a lot of cushion that Indian box office got because of Hollywood releases which were missing in the last two years.
South has been a bit stagnant except Kannada where Kantara helped it grow.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: It was number two right on your list of top 30 films.
Shailesh Kapoor: That is number two overall of course aided by a strong Hindi business as well but it is an original Kannada language film. Footfalls have been stagnant and there's a minor drop of six percent but that drop is more because Hindi and Hollywood have contributed more and footfalls normally are more south skewed because of lower ticket prices and more higher single screen presence but the fact that footfalls have not grown and yet box office continues to grow is telling us that the category is really growing on the back of higher ticket prices over the last few years that has been the trend and there is of course this argument that cinema is more becoming a luxury because of the ticket prices and that's an argument which a lot of people have made that and the real mass consumption will come only if we can reduce ticket prices so that debate will continue and I think the numbers are highlighting that at least right now reducing ticket prices is not what that is happening in reality. A lot of movies have offers like buy one get one free and 99 rupees and Tuesdays and all of that.
Fundamentally when a new film comes the ticket prices are going up. Even south we saw in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Telugu cinema this year the bigger films much higher ticket prices than they used to before and that's one of the reasons why ticket prices have gone up across the board especially in south this year. Last one is Gujarati cinema.
It's the most unlikely story almost nobody probably saw it coming one or two years ago when it was not as a scene. Now it's ahead of Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali and by some margin and yeah one single film did 114 crore gross which is Lalo and then multiple other films have contributed taking the Gujarati box office beyond 200 crore. It has never even touched 100 crore in the past.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Phenomenal. So can I say it's been a great year for Indian cinema at the box office?
Shailesh Kapoor: Yes I think it's been a I would say it's been a good year for Indian cinema but it's been a great year for Hindi cinema in particular and that was one which was much awaited because at the end of the day well of course each language is important. Large part of the country speaks Hindi language and if Hindi cinema is going to struggle then there's a larger question mark on how cinema is going to you know grow as a category. So this year at least that's been a big plus that original Hindi language cinema has seen a very good growth.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: And that's also it's also an economic argument because 40 to anywhere from 40 to 45 percent of box office gross comes from Hindi cinema simply because of the size of the market. So you know it falls down then it weighs down all the other cinemas also. But you know you've raised one is we have a box office which after five years has crossed 12,000.
It's always hovered between 11 and 12 and it's never crossed so that's phenomenal. Then this Gujarati cinema thing Hindi bouncing back. But tell me one thing and you mentioned this that footfalls in the south haven't been good.
What has happened in the south? Is it prices going up? Is it not enough films or not enough films with major stars coming?
What has happened because you know for three four years the story we kept hearing is about you know how Hindi people don't understand cinema and our south people get it which I thought was a fallacious argument because every cinema has good years and bad years you know. So what's actually gone wrong? Malayalam is a big surprise to me.
You Shailesh you remember Malayalam doubled in 2024 from about 500 to 1100 crore. It has stuck. It hasn't grown this year but has stuck to 1100 crore.
I'm very surprised about that. So could you unpack a bit of the south thing for us in terms of what's happening there?
Shailesh Kapoor: Yeah so Malayalam is a little different from Tamil and Telugu in the sense that it's more story driven rather than star driven. It is primarily driven by variety of genres and concepts and it is the case this year as well. If you see the top 10 Malayalam films you will see practically every possible genre.
There's superhero, there's action, there's crime, there's romance, there's comedy, horror comedy of pure order. So everything is getting covered in the mix of the big Malayalam films. As far as Tamil and Telugu is concerned I think the nature of this lot of theatrical business in India especially some of these languages is that it is dependent on the top films and if we had a Pushpa 2 which was a Telugu film last year in 2024 then a film like that single-handedly can make the Telugu box office look very good because one film itself will contribute 500, 600, 700 crore in that language plus of course what it will do in Hindi and you can make the numbers look good. There was RRR, KGF and those kind of films earlier.
I think this year in 2025 there was only one really big south film which was from Panera incidentally which is Kantara which fired. There were many others which could have done bigger numbers but either stopped at 150-200 crore or even lesser than that. I mean for the films like Thug Life which did not do even 100 crore and those kind of films when they come across the setback at that point of time.
But even otherwise if you see a lot of second line of south films they are nowhere close to 400-500 crore which has been the missing link this year. Now it could be a function of the kind of films at least but I guess especially Telugu is driven a lot by stars and some of the stars there one could argue except for Alwajun and Prabhas couple of younger stars most of the stars are getting older the older ones and then there could be a challenge to see if we can sustain that. 2024 also had Kalki which was a Prabhas film along with Pushpa.
There were two really big Telugu in India films which was missing this year and so they can be in a factor of what films released in the year. But it is telling us that it's not as if everything is great in south it would be still a function of the kind of films which come and one has to hope that this year has better releases in general.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: You know what this is something we discussed about Hindi for a couple of years now that supply was a problem and also studios did not have confidence about what would work and you mentioned that Sayara was some kind of turning point. Can you tell me what happened in Hindi and you know this is with the disclaimer to my audience that remember films is completely cyclical in nature. One good film in the industry looks good and one bad film and the whole industry is coloured by it but we make like something close to 2000 films a year.
Every film cannot be a Pushpa 2 or a Durandar or a Jawan. They will all be different.
Shailesh Kapoor: The issue that happened with Hindi cinema is post-pandemic because when theatres reopened and the box office business was obviously going to take some time to recover. I think there was a general sense that audience tastes have changed and audiences are no longer going to go for the kind of films that they were going before the pandemic and partly it may be true because OTT had come in because of the pandemic and people may watch certain type of films like Lapata Ladies is a famous example. Didn't do that well in theatres at all but has done quite well on Netflix.
So there was a sense that the taste of audiences now evolved to more mass action, larger than life, Pushpa, KGF. Cinema and Hindi cinema is not necessarily capable of making that kind of film but therefore a lot of productions, a lot of development of new ideas was stalled or you know there were scripts ready but the producer did not have the confidence that they should green light them from a theatrical perspective. Some of those scripts started going shopping for OTT buyers and then platforms were also quite unsure of buying that too many direct to OTT films because they would rather have a theatrical release.
So I think there was a price of confidence in the last two years in the Hindi film industry that do they even understand what the audience want and I think that Saiyara broke because it kind of is old school classical romance. It is something that you would totally see working pre-pandemic as well and I think this report in a way tells us that fundamental audience tastes have not changed and should not. It's quite logical in hindsight that audiences are still looking for entertainment and they'll look for variety of stories and characters and anything that engages them emotionally or kind of helps them de-stress or connects them to characters and their world will do well.
It's a classic storytelling thing but somehow this narrative that only action films is what everybody should be making is what had led to a certain drop in supply also in the last two years and I just think the second half of this year 2025 and therefore 2026 that will go away because more films will be greenlit simply because now there's more confidence that a mix of genres can work.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: You know so three things one is box office process 13,000 crore the mighty genre thing which you brought up and therefore you know which you elucidated just now and thirdly this rise in Gujarati cinema. The one thing I just wanted to ask is this six percent fall you know from 883 million tickets sold went to 832 million because you know we were on a rising trajectory till at least 2024 no till 2023 and then what is happening here to your mind and is it linked to screens is it linked to films I'm not getting it.
Shailesh Kapoor: It's linked to habit what if you see a film like Durandar it is now the biggest crossing Hindi film three to two years ago was the biggest crossing Hindi film. We are seeing that the big and before that it was Jawan so every year the big the record for the highest crossing original Hindi language film is getting broken which basically means that for the bigger films more and more people are willing to go but the number of films that an average person is watching is not going up or maybe even going down because that number used to be around four before the pandemic and when we did the last sizing of audiences in around a year and a half back the number for Hindi had dropped to 3.1 or 3.2 which means that an average person goes only around three times in a whole year to watch a Hindi film.
Those who are going well in south that number was six and seven at the same time times a year means once in four months so once in four months cannot really be called a habit and of course there are people a cohort which will be going like eight times a year 15 times a year but those are like you know the core audiences and they may be very small in number but a film like Durandar would get many people out to theatres a film like Sayara may get many young people out to theatres but the habit of going once a month or once in two months more consistently is not something which has got created so then the dependence will be more on that really big event film which will come which may not always come there could be certain quarters when there is no film like that and that's where you see numbers dip and that's why you see this monthly fluctuation month on month like November was of 2025 was actually a very weak month and then suddenly October and December are like this big months on either side of it because Kantara and Durandar came in those months so it's I think it's the ticket prices are going up because the dependence on big films is going up and big films will always charge higher ticket prices and if audiences are going to step out only selectively to watch certain type of big films then it would lead to footballs dropping now good news is that those big films now include as AR also so big films do not are no longer being defined by big star cast or big budgets having defined what catches the imagination of people and what enters the pop culture even if it is something very medium budget or newcomers it should be fine but yeah I think we just need to create more habit and habit creation ticket price can play a role because in our research a lot of times we hear audiences saying that we could have watched this film in but then we have a netflix subscription so it seems like we have to spend now extra money to go to theatre versus also pay for a subscription so now now while for a film like sayara or chava they will still go to the theatre but for a lot of mid-range films like if you see film like huck which came two months ago uh fairly good film has dropped on netflix last couple weeks ago doing very well on netflix but did not do that well at the box office in terms of the numbers it worked because it's again that middle middling kind of a film which lot of people would feel that they can wait to watch on okt you know it's very interesting you
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: brought this up because on and on what a hit film is because it doesn't have to be a only a javan it can also be a sayara uh one of the things ajay vijli told me um this was in november last year just before i think the durindar madness happened it took off um he said that uh it has been a good year and this year the box office will cross 13,000 crore this is what he said and he said one of the reasons it's been a good year is because there are many many smaller films which are crossing 100 crore in gross box office revenue so his point was that i think till october end he talked about 29 films you have a figure of 37 correct you know and what was it last year and what does this tell us the fact that such a large number of films 37 films is a large number have crossed earlier you remember 100 crores used to be this magic number of course if you build in inflation etc it doesn't seem like a very large number but nevertheless for a sayara or for a which is about specially abled people to cross 200 crore or for many of these films or a gujarati film to cross 100 crore i mean these are big numbers so what does it say about the market
Shailesh Kapoor: yeah so it was 37 films in 2025 it was only 22 in 2024 that's the difference yeah yeah and if we just look at original hindi language only six films grossed 100 crore in 2024 and that became 15 in 2025 so that's almost two and a half times and nine more films and one of the reasons for hindi at least is that there's better supply in the second half of 2025 there have been more regular releases i remember in 2024 there were patches of six weeks eight weeks at a stretch and no really film was even coming out so there's no releases and your lot of re-releases started happening also as a result because the traders had open windows and there were no content to run and now if you see the last four five months re-releases have virtually stopped because there is no space for re-releases and uh so better pipeline better supply on a regular basis is something which is definitely helped in hindi which is not the case with Tamil telugu because the supply was similar to 2024 in terms of the flow of releases so that's one thing which has really helped another thing we are seeing is that a lot of these franchise kind of films which are now they're not really the big franchises like say spy universe or pushpa but you know if you see a raid 2 house full 5 these kind of films jolly llb 3 they all come out now at a frequency that every two years one more film may come out or you know if one of these franchises the dhamal will come and then goldman will come and these kind of things they are always those safe films which will even if the content is average or not great will end up doing 120 150 crore uh so now these franchises have been built over the years and i think now is the time when we are realising the
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: value of some of these okay okay great and there's been a lot of talk last question there's been a lot of talk about uh pan indian and the if i don't use the word pan indian but about finally the numbers reflecting that indian uh box office operates as one national market is that a correct perception or are we still very separate i mean a malayalam film which crosses over or a gujarati and gujarati is not crossed over in that sense but a telugu film will cross over but is it
Shailesh Kapoor: operating as one national market not really because it's operating as one national market in ott where audiences are very open to watching multi-language content and we see that a film like soo from so which is a canada film uh which did very well but there are no hindi box office numbers or no numbers in the hindi market as far as theatrical is concerned but the viewership on uh for a film like that or for many malayalam films on in the hindi market is quite substantial and they would often compete with the mainstream hindi films on for or just the fact that platforms are you know willing to take so many south films and put a hindi version of them and promote it on their app and kind of put it out there for the consumers the algorithm shows it up because a lot of people are watching it uh now in theatrical that's not the case malayalam has never really broken out in the hindi market even in these two years when malayalam cinema has had great years none of the films have done well in the dubbed hindi version in other places pushed back to kind of a kdf2 but those are franchise films there'll be one odd kantara kind of a film when first came three years ago uh which broke out but most of the the films starring rajnikanth vijay and some of the bigger south stars in tamil and telugu in hindi they would end up probably doing 15 crore 20 crore kind of business at best fully for example in hindi is in that range it's nowhere more than that uh within south more uh yeah more and lie with it like telugu films in karnataka have a huge mark tamil films in kerala have a huge market but um and of course the hollywood films are the only truly pan-indian films in that sense what a thing to say now that hollywood films are truly the pie yeah because if you see an avatar actually it's getting so much business from the south and yet obviously there's a hindi market and all like south is almost 40 of all international business and 60 come from the west and the north markets uh what is called the hindi screen market so in that sense international cinema or hollywood is actually quite balanced i think otherwise we it's more a function of kantara pushpa kind of films which break this so we are far from being one market in that sense yeah it's essentially a language thing more than anything else right in theatrical uh sense people are still going for the language of their comfort and everything doesn't really work theatrically when it is dubbed in oddity i think people stress are slightly evolved they're also more comfortable using subtitle watching with subtitles which is not the case with yet theatrical at all quick this thing on the methodology quick brief on the methodology so the methodology is that every major film's numbers are verified through at least three independent sources which are credible so for example if it's a tamil film it could be a local tamil distributor who has good knowledge of the market it would be a studio which is involved in that film for example or it could be some independent journalist who's credible and who's reporting numbers from that market but any major film major i mean even a film which is doing five crore or ten crore business uh its number could have been locked with at least three independent sources verifying it as being within a very particular range of five ten percent of the actual number so the idea is to build more contacts and collect data from a wide variety of sources and over time be able to understand who are the truly unbiased and authentic sources who have an ear on the ground as well as we have no motive to give you an inflated number it's funny you know we don't still don't have box office
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: tracking rent rack style in india or we had and it hasn't worked very much yeah that's an issue
Shailesh Kapoor: related to digitisation because lord till all your theatres are digitised which is not the case in india that that is difficult to implement so that would require 100 digitisation of ticketing
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: across all theatres all right thank you so much alice thank you for your time and for your patience and for the report.
Shailesh Kapoor: thank you Vanita pleasure on this
