Hindi
Box office pops the corn as 2025 cracks Rs 13,000 crore club
MUMBAI: Popcorn flew off the shelves and the tills rang louder than ever in 2025, as Indian cinema delivered its biggest box-office performance on record. According to The Ormax Box Office Report: 2025, the industry clocked a staggering gross of Rs 13,395 crore, becoming the first year to cross the Rs 13,000 crore milestone and comfortably overtaking the previous high of Rs 12,226 crore set in 2023
At the heart of the record run was Dhurandhar, which emerged as the year’s top grosser with Rs 950 crore, rewriting history as the highest-grossing Hindi film of all time. Overall, 37 films crossed the Rs 100 crore mark in 2025, a sharp jump from 22 in 2024, underlining the growing skew towards big-ticket successes
Hindi cinema had a year to remember, posting its best-ever collections of Rs 5,504 crore, up 18 per cent year-on-year. Notably, 93 per cent of Hindi box-office revenue came from original Hindi films, with reliance on dubbed South titles dropping steeply from 31 per cent in 2024 to just 7 per cent in 2025. While Telugu and Malayalam held steady, Kannada cinema stood out with strong growth, even as the combined share of the four South languages eased from 48 per cent to 44 per cent.
International films staged a striking comeback, registering 49 per cent growth to deliver their highest-grossing year in India since the pandemic and the second-best ever after 2019. Their share of the total box office touched double digits for the first time since 2022, signalling renewed audience appetite for global tentpoles.
Yet, the boom came with a caveat. Footfalls slipped 6 per cent to 83.2 crore, highlighting the industry’s growing dependence on higher ticket prices. The average ticket price surged 20 per cent, from Rs 134 to Rs 161, its sharpest rise in four years, driven by premium Hindi and international films and higher pricing for South Indian tentpoles.
The Ormax Box Office Report-2025 Taken together, 2025 paints a picture of a box office powered less by crowds and more by scale, pricing and a handful of breakout hits. As Ormax’s data shows, the money is flowing faster than ever even if fewer feet are walking into cinemas, setting up a fascinating new equation for Indian theatrical cinema going forward.
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.
