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Saiyaara soars as July box office scripts 2025’s biggest blockbuster month
MUMBAI: The Indian film industry found its monsoon magic in July and the box office is dancing in the rain. After a lukewarm June, July 2025 stormed ahead to become the year’s strongest month yet at the Indian box office, powered by two juggernauts: Hindi romance-drama Saiyaara and the animated epic Mahavatar Narsimha. Together, the duo accounted for more than 45 per cent of the month’s total collections, proving that love stories and mythological action still bring audiences to the theatres in droves.
Leading the charge, Saiyaara grossed a staggering Rs 392 crore, making it the second-highest earner of the year so far, behind only Chhaava. Close on its heels, Mahavatar Narsimha roared to Rs 259 crore, with the Hindi version alone contributing 75 per cent of the take. Add in Hollywood’s heavyweights Jurassic World Rebirth and Superman & The Fantastic Four: The First Steps and the July box office became a truly global playground.
The cumulative box office tally for 2025 releases has already climbed 22 per cent higher than the same period last year, keeping the industry firmly on track to cross the Rs 12,000 crore mark by year-end. That would put 2025 in contention to dethrone the all-time record set in 2023 at Rs 12,226 crore. Language-wise, Hindi continues to dominate with five titles in the year’s Top 10, while Hollywood has clawed up to a 12 per cent share of the pie, its best since 2022. Kannada too got its moment with horror-comedy Su From So, lifting its share from under 1 per cent in June to more than 2 per cent in July, while Malayalam slipped from 10 per cent to 8 per cent.
If July is any indication, 2025 could well end up rewriting the box office record books with Bollywood, Hollywood, and even regional cinema scripting their own plot twists along the way.
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YES Bank appoints S Anantharaman as chief risk officer
Former Jio Financial Services group chief risk officer takes charge of enterprise-wide risk at the embattled private lender
MUMBAI: YES Bank is not taking chances with risk anymore. The private lender has appointed S Anantharaman as its chief risk officer, a hire that signals the bank’s continued effort to rebuild credibility and tighten the controls that once famously slipped.
Anantharaman arrives from Jio Financial Services, where he served as group chief risk officer and built a risk management architecture spanning lending, payments, insurance broking and asset management from the ground up. Before that, he held the chief risk officer role at Bank of Baroda and senior leadership positions at HDFC Bank and L&T Finance Holdings. Three decades in banking and financial services, in other words, with scars and qualifications to match. He is a chartered accountant and a CFA charterholder.
At YES Bank, his brief is considerable. Anantharaman will oversee the bank’s entire enterprise-wide risk framework, covering credit policy, market risk, operational risk, information security, data governance, analytics, model governance and data privacy. It is, in short, every lever that matters when a bank is trying to prove it has grown up.
YES Bank’s turbulent past needs little rehearsing. What it needs now is exactly what Anantharaman has spent thirty years building: the kind of risk culture that stops problems before they become headlines. The appointment suggests the bank knows it.
