Indian cinema shines brighter at box office Down Under with record run

Indian films are set to cross A$39 million at the Australian box office in 2025, outperforming local cinema and becoming the third-largest after the US and UK

Over the last three years, Indian films have outperformed Australian ones at the Australian box office. They are expected to end 2025 with Australian dollar (A$) 39 million, or ₹224 crore, in gross box-office revenues, compared with A$13 million (₹75 crore) in 2021. That means Indian cinema would account for over 4.3 per cent of the estimated A$900 million Australian box-office collection, becoming the third-largest in that country, next only to the US and UK. 

“It is the first time in the Anglosphere that a home nation has lost to a foreign language provider. In Canada, the UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand, foreign-language cinema has never overtaken the home country before,” says Nick Hayes, a Sydney-based film analyst. His report, “Audiences Speak – It is Time We Listen”, which was released in late October, is the first one to highlight this trend. 

Almost 38 per cent of the gross box-office revenues of Indian films this year came from Hindi language films like Saiyaara and Chhaava. Punjabi (16 per cent) and Malayalam (14 per cent) were distant number two and three. 

Much of this success is down to three things. 

One, the doubling (roughly) of the diaspora to over one million in the two censuses from 2016 to 2021. 

Two, “having dedicated film distributors in Australia, who truly understand their audience”, as Louis Georg, programmer, Hoyts Cinema, says in the report. A huge amount of work has gone into ensuring that Indian films are screened by theatre chains in Australia by some of the earliest Indian distributors like Mind Blowing Films. Mitu Bhowmick Lange, founder and director of Mind Blowing, reminisces about the struggle to simply get screens in the early days when one Indian film would barely do A$30,000 worth of business. “When 3 Idiots came to Australia in 2010, it played on only 20 screens and still crossed the A$1 million mark – the first film to do so. That is when the trade started looking at Indian films seriously,” she says. Now, most of the big films routinely go way beyond the A$ 1 million mark. 

Hayes reckons an Indian movie now gets over 100 screens, or roughly a third of the screens that a mainstream Hollywood film gets in Australia. “We started with Hoyts Cinemas, but now even in the snobbiest art house cinemas, you will see not just Bollywood, but Tamil, Telugu and Punjabi films screening consistently,” says Bhowmick. In 2010, she started the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne, which is now funded by the Victorian government.  “It is the only Indian Film Festival funded by a foreign government. We are the biggest celebration of Indian cinema outside India,” says Bhowmick. All of this then adds up to wider reach and awareness. 

The third reason why Indian films are doing well down under is consistent supply. On average, about 200 Indian movies were screened in Australia every year over the last five years – that keeps the distribution system lubricated. This is simply the result of a robust domestic market in India, which is 90 per cent local.

 

Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking people are 4 per cent of Australia’s population, which makes them a large ethnic group almost equal to Indians. However, an average of only 35 Chinese films were released annually in the last five years.

 

Hayes points to another piece of data to note that growth in the coming years will remain incremental. According to the 2021 census, 1.06 million people speak Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Gujarati, and Bengali — categorised as Indian languages in Australia. It is 4.2 per cent of the Australian population. “The gross box office for Indian cinema is almost on a par with our diaspora population, so any growth above that is going to have to be by entering the mainstream,” he says. That is a tough ask for any cinema. Hollywood is the only one to go mainstream in large parts of the world.