Hindi
The Avengers nets Rs 470 mn in India
MUMBAI: Marvel Studios and Disney’s superhero ensemble film, The Avengers, has become the fourth highest Hollywood grosser in India, according to UTV Motion Pictures.
The big screen adaptation of the Marvel comic has earned over Rs 470 million net in its fourth-week run so far. Having released on 27 April, a week before its US release, the film is still running in both the 2D and 3D formats in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
The top five Hollywood films in India are Avatar (net lifetime collections of Rs 990 million), 2012 (Rs 650 million), Spider-Man 3 (Rs 490 million), The Avengers, which has so far raked in Rs 460 million so far and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Rs 350 million), according to data provided by UTV.
The Avengers is one of the first big ticket Hollywood releases in India by Disney UTV.
“The unprecedented success of The Avengers in India is a great demonstration of how the same aggressive marketing and distribution strategies we adopt to release our big ticket Hindi movies can be applied to Hollywood movies as well. The Avengers is one of those movies that has wowed critics and audiences alike, and in the incredible opening followed up by throngs of repeat audiences, have helped the film break records not just in India but globally. We are thrilled that one of the first big ticket Hollywood releases in India by Disney UTV, has achieved this level of success,” said UTV Motion Pictues CEO Siddharth Roy Kapur.
Overseas, the film has joined the billion dollar box office club in just 19 days. Tapping its trajectory, international trade pundits predict that the film is slated to become the third highest grossing film of all time by the end of its run after Avatar and Titanic.
The film stars Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Chris Evans as Captain America, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and Tom Hiddleston as Loki.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
