As Indian Cinema Explodes Globally, It Faces the Same Problems Plaguing Hollywood

HYDERABAD – In Ramoji Film City, a record 2,000-acre film complex just outside of the southern Indian metropolis of Hyderabad, a crowd large enough to fill a Comic-Con Hall H presentation eight times over has gathered to see a four-minute concept teaser trailer for a film that still has four months of shooting left. 

Ask anyone in that crowd of 50,000 why they would drive at least an hour from Hyderabad’s city center and walk at least a half-mile to see something that is being live-streamed to hundreds of millions across India, and every single response will include two words they say with their chests:

“JAI BABU!”

At a time when Hollywood is lamenting the demise of star power, Indian actor Mahesh Babu proves it is more than thriving in his home country. Fifty years old but with the vitality of a man at least 20 years younger, he is one of the country’s highest-paid actors and commands a wildly passionate fanbase that would make even Timothée Chalamet blush.

It is Babu’s star power that S.S. Rajamouli, director of the 2022 global hit action film “RRR,” has made the centerpiece of his next larger-than-life blockbuster, “Varanasi,” which will hit theaters in 2027 as just the second Indian film shot for Imax screens. 

Rajamouli is regarded as the flag-bearer for the surging “Pan-Indian” movement, with films that get massive budgets and full dubbing support in the hopes of winning over audiences across India’s varied regions, languages and local cultures. But beyond Rajamouli himself, locals tell TheWrap that the chase for pan-Indian success has led the country’s film industry into problems that are surprisingly similar to the ones Hollywood faces, as variety in genre, budget size and appeal to specific regional audiences are sacrificed in the hopes of a big blockbuster windfall.

And amidst all of this, filming for “Varanasi” presses on, combining big-budget spectacle with a singular artistic vision that has the potential to cross over worldwide, just as “RRR” did three years ago.

As the trailer finally rolled in Hyderabad, the crowd instantly recognized who Babu was playing as he rode the bull Nandi and wielded a trident, both iconic symbols of Shiva. With just a few minutes of footage, Rajamouli and Babu called their shot: “Varanasi” will be a movie that will show the world what Indian history, culture and mythology looks like on the big screen when given a tentpole budget.

To cap off the night, out comes Babu with the trailer playing for a second time behind him, wielding the same trident as the Hindu deity Lord Rama and riding a mechanical version of Nandi in an entrance that would belong at WrestleMania. Fireworks ignite around the star as he is lifted on a hydraulic platform to address the masses gathered to see him and local police line up in front of the tall gate dividing the stage from the crowd. 

“I’ll make everyone proud. Most importantly, I’ll make my director the most proud. The whole of India will be proud of us,” he vowed as the chants of “Jai Babu” rained down upon him again and again. 

More than Bollywood

In the U.S., the term “Bollywood” is used as a catch-all for the entire Indian film industry and the more than 2,000 films it puts out annually. In reality, Bollywood refers to the largest portion of that industry based in Mumbai and which produces films in Hindi, India’s widest-known language with an estimated 520 million speakers.

But beyond that, there is a constellation of local film industries that produce films primarily for speakers of the country’s 21 other officially recognized languages and the thousands of dialects within them. These languages include Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati and Assamese. 

And then there is the language in which Hyderabad’s film industry primarily shoots, and which has been thrust into the global spotlight thanks to S.S. Rajamouli: Telugu. 

Hitting theaters in spring 2022 at a time when Hollywood’s theatrical output was still being hindered by the effects of the pandemic, “RRR” became the second highest-grossing film in India’s history with $114 million in its home country, plus an additional $36.5 million from international audiences, particularly in the U.S. and Japan. Viral videos of audiences around the world dancing in theaters to the film’s signature song, “Naatu Naatu,” helped drive it to win the Best Original Song Oscar, making “RRR” the first Indian film ever to win an Academy Award. 

But “RRR” isn’t the only recent hit to come from the Telugu film industry, which is primarily based in Hyderabad and caters primarily to moviegoers in the southern half of the country. Rajamouli’s two-part predecessor to “RRR,” “Baahubali,” and the action sequel “Pushpa 2” have also cracked the top five all-time box office list in India. Not bad for a portion of the industry that accounts for roughly 20% of the country’s annual box office. 

For decades, the vast majority of films made in India were made primarily for the speakers of whatever language it was shot in, with many of them tapping into slang, dialects or culture and history specific to its region.

But Rajamouli has become the most successful purveyor of a new movement in the country called “Pan-Indian” cinema. These films come with top budgets, try to draw stars with national notoriety, and perhaps most importantly, are rooted in mythology, history or stories that are resonant with all Indians and come with a budget for high quality dubbing in all Indian languages. 

“I think what allowed ‘RRR’ and ‘Baahubali’ to be successful was that every emotion displayed on the screen was as big as the action and the spectacle,” said S.S. Karthikeya, Rajamouli’s son and producing partner. “And it is around stories that are known to all Indians and shown in a way that they’ve never seen before.”

Someone else who had never seen Indian cinema on that scale before “Baahubali” is Christopher Tillman, VP of International Distribution and Development at Imax. He said that the premium format company’s involvement with “Varanasi” is one that has been a decade in the making. After preliminary talks with Rajamouli during the filming of “Baahubali,” Imax was ready to partner with him to make “RRR” the first Indian film with the “Filmed for Imax” label, but the COVID pandemic forced those plans to be shuttered.

“After ‘RRR’ became such a huge hit, we were even more sure that we wanted to partner with Mr. Rajamouli on our next film,” Tillman told TheWrap. “We invited him earlier this year to our headquarters in L.A. and we had very long talks about the Imax technology, about working with different screen ratios

In recent years, Tillman’s team has signed distribution deals with various high-budget Indian films from across regional hubs as part of its much-touted effort to increase the number of local language films it puts on its screens worldwide and, in doing so, decouple its box office fortunes from the ups-and-downs of Hollywood tentpoles. Earlier this year, Imax announced that “L2: Empurran,” a political action thriller that is the second chapter of a planned trilogy, would be the first Malayalam film to get play on their screens. 

But so far, no Indian film has received the “Filmed for Imax” label, which comes with close collaboration from pre-production onwards between Imax and filmmakers like Joseph Kosinski (“F1”) and James Gunn (“Superman”). 

That is going to change starting next year with “Ramayana,” a tentpole-level Hindi film of arguably the most famous story in Indian mythology. With Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman composing music for the film and global animation/VFX studio DNEG attached as co-producers, it will be the first Indian film ever with the “Filmed for Imax,” followed by “Varanasi” the next year. 

The Pan-Indian risk

The Pan-Indian movement has elevated Indian cinema’s global standing, pushing the boundaries of what it can produce and allowing top filmmakers like Rajamouli to produce Hollywood-quality films rooted in local culture. As we’ve seen in China with the animation box office record breaker “Ne Zha 2,” that combination can be an artistically fruitful and financially profitable one. 

But the lure of huge box office returns across all of India and not just one or two states can have big drawbacks when a film doesn’t have the talent or script to back it up, and it has led to issues in the Telugu cinema industry that will sound surprisingly similar to the ones that Hollywood is facing in a post-pandemic world.

Maruthi Achaya, film reporter for India Today, told TheWrap during a meeting in Hyderabad that so far in 2025, only a precious handful of major Telugu films have been theatrically profitable. One high-profile misfire kicked the year off: “Game Changer,” an action film starring “RRR” leading man Ram Charan as the son of the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and who uses his encyclopedic knowledge of the law – plus his fists – to root out political corruption. 

Though “Game Changer” had a reported global opening of 100 crore ($11.5 million), its ticket sales quickly plummeted amidst lukewarm word-of-mouth, and the film failed to make back its 450 crore ($50 million) budget. 

“There have been many Telugu movies in the last five years that have been trying to make everything bigger, even if the story can be told on a smaller scale, and then the movies don’t make back their budget,” Achaya said. 

Achaya also argues that the demise in genre variety that has been seen in Hollywood – with comedies like “The Naked Gun” and “One of Them Days” being an endangered species while mature dramas and prestige films like “Black Bag” and “Materialists” struggle to make half of what their pre-pandemic counterparts made – is also playing out in India.

What used to be a healthy ecosystem of films of various genres and budget sizes is getting choked out as producers, chasing the big payday of a Pan-Indian hit, put more resources into a few blockbusters, some of which face delays as they encounter hurdles that might be more easily overcome by a Hollywood studio with more resources and corporate funding. 

Meanwhile, the filmmakers that don’t specialize in the big popcorn flicks – or masala films, as they are called in India – have longer intervals between their movies. As an example, Achaya pointed to the 2021 film “Uppena,” winner of the National Film Award for Best Telugu Feature Film. It is the debut feature film of director Buchi Babu Sana and tells a story about a romance between a fisherman and a wealthy developer’s daughter while addressing social issues like castes and honor killing. Sana’s follow-up film, a cricket drama called “Peddi,” is due out next March, more than five years after the release of “Uppena.” 

“Telugu cinema has become so popular in recent years not just because of the spectacle but because it balanced that with meaningful story,” Achaya said. “If the movie theaters become a place where only big pan-Indian films can be found while content-driven films go straight to OTT, we will lose what makes the industry special.”

And as anyone working in Hollywood could tell anyone working in Hyderabad, once people fall out of the habit of going to theaters and get more comfortable waiting to see a movie at home, it’s hard to bring them back. It’s even harder when rising moviegoing costs make going to the theater a worse value proposition, and that is playing out in major Indian cities just as it is in American ones. 

In its most recent quarterly report, Indian theater chain PVR INOX reported an average ticket price at its theaters of 254 rupees ($2.79 in dollars), well above the national ticket price average of 130 rupees ($1.43). Like in the U.S. and the rest of the world, multiplex chains in India, which are steadily replacing the family-owned single-screen theaters that extended Indian cinema’s cultural dominance to the most rural areas of the country, are relying on premium screens and higher concession prices to boost per-patron spending while overall attendance decreases. 

And that means that just like America, these multiplexes need big tentpole films to drive turnout, and the prioritization of those blockbusters has left India’s independent filmmakers struggling to find screens to put their movies on. Earlier this month, the erotic psychological drama “Agra” from director Kanu Behl hit theaters in India, two years after its premiere at the Cannes Directors Fortnight. 

Behl took to social media to call out multiplexes for scheduling early morning or late night screentimes for “Agra,” if they screened the film at all. On Nov. 17, Behl published an open letter signed by 40 fellow directors calling out an “unsustainable” system in which India’s indie films struggle to secure theatrical screenings and later find streaming distributors because their films lack the box office numbers they were never given a fair chance to earn. 

In response to this, the filmmakers asked officials, theaters and film councils to commit to reforms such as instituting monthly or quarterly periods where theaters prioritize independent and smaller budget films, more private-public partnerships to encourage national distribution of indie titles and a system that does not prioritize theatrical performance for streaming distribution. 

“We offer this statement with respect, seriousness and urgency. No antagonist, no blame. Only the collective need for a healthier system,” the statement read. “India’s independent films have shaped the way the world sees us. It is time for us to shape a system where our audiences can see us too.”

A global hit

While India’s filmmaking future remains in flux, Rajamouli has his head down working on “Varanasi.” After a weekend of meeting with financiers and the global press, he’s got an estimated four more months of shooting with Babu and his co-stars Prithviraj Sukumaran and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, the latter of whom is starring in her first Telugu film ever and her first Indian film in any language since the Hindi film “The Sky Is Pink” in 2019.

After physically demanding shoots in Africa and Antarctica – two locales featured in the Imax teaser trailer, Rajamouli will be shooting over the winter months on indoor and outdoor soundstages in Hyderabad, weaving a story that spans from the present day all the way back to 500 BCE, bringing the historical scope of one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities to the big screen. 

When “Varanasi” arrives in 2027, it will be a cinematic event in India on par with Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” And beyond the country’s borders, theaters in communities with major Indian populations from Melbourne to New Jersey will get some of the biggest profits they will earn all year. 

We know this because even now, Indian films have become key moneymakers for theaters located in immigrant communities. This past weekend, the Hindi action thriller “Dhurandhar” earned $3.5 million from just 377 theaters. With $7.9 million and counting, it will be the highest-grossing Hindi film in the U.S. this year.

According to insiders at Regal Cinemas, “Dhurandhar” became the top ticket-selling film at three locations in major cities by a considerable margin. At the Regal Fox in the Washington D.C. suburb of Ashburn, Virginia, the film grossed $30,000 this past Friday and Saturday, five times the next highest-grossing film.

“Dhurandhar” also overperformed to a similar degree at the Regal Hacienda, a California multiplex in the East Bay town of Dublin, and the Regal Commerce Center in North Brunswick, New Jersey, two communities with significant Indian-American populations.

“When we’ve put a film like ‘RRR’ on our screens, any theater in an Indian diaspora community anywhere in the world sells out our auditoriums for multiple opening weekend screenings. We saw huge numbers for that film in Australia, the U.S. and even Japan,” Tillman said. “These films get massive social media buzz in India and from there it spreads around the world because there’s a big audience that actively seeks out ways to see these films at a nearby theater.”

Whether anything in “Varanasi” gets the global clout of “Naatu Naatu” remains to be seen, but Rajamouli tells TheWrap that he hopes his next film will continue to “open the door wider” for all of Indian cinema, as “RRR” not only raised the global profile of Telugu cinema, but helped grow a wider understanding of the rich nuances of India’s cinematic culture. 

“It is extraordinary for our work to be recognized not just as an Indian film, but as a Telugu film. You’re standing on your feet,” he said. “And beyond that, with ‘RRR’s’ success, if it encourages the world to explore more of Indian film they’ll see that there’s not just Bollywood cinema and Telugu cinema. There’s Tamil cinema and Malayalam cinema and so much more. So we are starting to open the doors just a slip, and there so much more work to keep opening those doors.”

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