‘After Saiyaara, a lot of confidence has come in. Hindi is now looking good, especially with Dhurandhar 2 expected in March.’
IMAGE: Rajinikanth in Coolie.
Indian box office collections touched around Rs 13,397 crore (Rs 133 billion) in 2025, up 13 per cent from the previous year. Ticket sales (footfalls) slipped slightly, while average ticket prices rose 20 per cent. Hindi and international films bounced back strongly, but the surprise performer was Gujarati cinema, which grew more than three times, albeit on a small base.
An even bigger surprise was the top-30 list, which featured no major Tamil or Telugu film except Rajinikanth’s Coolie. The Kannada hit Kantara: A Legend – Chapter 1, along with three Malayalam films, brought the South into the top-films chart.
Ormax Media’s Box Office Report 2025, shared exclusively with Business Standard, lays out these and other trends.
The report covers only domestic box office revenues, ticket sales in India. Including streaming, television, music and overseas box office receipts, the Indian film business is estimated to have generated around Rs 21,000 crore (Rs 210 billion) in revenues in 2025.
Ticket sale revenues from Indian films finally moved past the range of Rs 11,000 crore to Rs 12,000 crore (Rs 110 billion to Rs120 billion), where they had been stuck for more than five years. That is the first piece of good news in the report. The jump was driven largely by a revival in Hindi and international films (Hollywood and anime), which had been struggling for the past two years.
IMAGE: Ranveer Singh in Dhurandhar 2.
Hindi cinema, in particular, had faced both a supply shortage and weak studio confidence.
“After Saiyaara, a lot of confidence has come in. Hindi is now looking good, especially with Dhurandhar 2 expected in March,” says Shailesh Kapoor, chief executive officer at Ormax Media.
Dhurandhar is by far the year’s biggest hit, with over Rs 950 crore (Rs 9.5 billion) in domestic box office gross. Worldwide, it has crossed Rs 1,300 crore (Rs 13 billion) in gross box office takings.
Chaava and War 2 have added to the list.
Hollywood, too, has shaken off the supply disruptions that followed the pandemic and the writers’ strike, lifting its share of the box office.
The second piece of good news is what Kapoor calls a ‘lot of genre balance’. He points to the top 30 list, which includes action drama (Dhurandhar, Kantara), romantic drama (Saiyaara), mythological fantasy (Thamma), and social messaging (Sitaare Zameen Par), among others.
“The theory after the pandemic was that audiences would step out only for big screen action films. This multi-genre scenario tells you that fundamentally the taste of the audience has not changed.”
IMAGE: Nandamuri Balakrishna in Akhanda 2.
The worrying part is a six per cent drop in footfalls (tickets sold), to 832 million from 883 million a year earlier. Kapoor attributes this to what he calls a ‘habit issue’: When a film such as Dhurandhar releases, ‘a lot of people go, but they don’t go for other films’.
Even so, that does not fully explain a 17 per cent fall in ticket sales in Tamil cinema and a 15 per cent decline in Telugu, both markets with strong film-going habits. One analyst points to big releases such as Thug Life and Vidaamuyarchi (Tamil), and Hari Hara Veera Mallu and Akhanda 2 (Telugu), which ‘failed to fire’.
The most heartening takeaway from the report is the breadth of hits. As many as 37 films crossed Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion) each in gross box office across genres and languages — from Gujarati and Malayalam to Hollywood and Hindi — up from 22 in 2024.
Malayalam cinema, which doubled its gross to about Rs 1,165 crore (Rs 11.65 billion) in 2024 from around Rs 572 crore (Rs 5.72 billion) the previous year, held steady at that level. That is significant for an industry that, for years, brought in less than Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion).
Together, these trends point to a market that is discovering its diversity, and increasingly behaving like one national box office.
Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff
