2025 best year for Indian cinema since pandemic despite lower footfalls

India's box office crossed ₹13,000 crore in 2025 as ticket prices surged and regional cinema surprised, even as overall footfalls slipped

Indian box-office collections touched around ₹13,397 crore 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 ₹21,000 crore in revenues in 2025. 

Ticket-sale revenues from Indian films finally moved past the range of ₹11,000 crore ₹12,000 crore, 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. 

Hindi cinema, in particular, had faced both a supply shortage and weak studio confidence.

 

“After Saiyara, a lot of confidence has come in. Hindi is now looking good, especially with Dhurandhar-II expected in March,” says Shailesh Kapoor, chief executive officer at Ormax Media. Dhurandhar is by far the year’s biggest hit, with over ₹950 crore in domestic box-office gross. Worldwide, it has crossed ₹1,300 crore 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 (Saiyara), 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.”

 

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 ₹100 crore 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 ₹1,165 crore in 2024 from around ₹572 crore the previous year, held steady at that level. That is significant for an industry that, for years, brought in less than ₹500 crore. Together, these trends point to a market that is discovering its diversity — and increasingly behaving like one national box office.