How AI Could Make Indian Cinema Even More Powerful
By J. J. Ghosh | 28 Apr, 2026

India's film industry is bigger than you think, more diverse than you've been told, and deploying AI faster than Hollywood is allowed to.

Bollywood isn’t Indian cinema.

It’s one part of Indian cinema — specifically the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, which takes its name from a mashup of Bombay and Hollywood.

India, a multilingual and multi-ethnic country, actually consists of several different industries corresponding to different states: Bollywood for Hindi, Tollywood for Telugu, Kollywood for Tamil, Mollywood for Malayalam, and Sandalwood for Kannada, among others.

Calling all of Indian cinema “Bollywood” is a bit like calling all American music “country.”  You’re pointing at something real.  You’re leaving out most of the picture.

This distinction matters more now than it ever has — and understanding it is the only way to understand what's coming.

RRR won an academy award for best song

What Makes Indian Cinema Distinct

Across all of its regional industries, Indian cinema shares a few things that set it apart from Hollywood in ways that are worth understanding.

The first is scale.  India ranks first in the world in annual film output, producing over 2,000 films yearly.  Hollywood makes more films than Bollywood specifically, but India sells more tickets globally — even accounting for ticket prices that are about one-tenth of ours.  The sheer volume of audience engagement is extraordinary.

The second is form.  An Indian film is a full-service emotional experience.  It is not unusual for a three-hour drama about family honor or forbidden love to pause for a fully choreographed musical number featuring the entire cast, several costume changes, and a backdrop that may have shifted from the Himalayas to Switzerland between verses.

"Bollywood" is a portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood

Songs aren’t incidental to the story — they’re the story, expressing emotions that the characters can’t say outright.  This isn’t a quirk or a limitation.  It’s a different grammar of cinema, one that has sustained one of the world’s largest entertainment industries for over a century.

The third is stardom.  Indian film stardom operates at a level of cultural intensity that makes American celebrity culture look restrained.  Shah Rukh Khan has an estimated personal net worth of over $1 billion, built almost entirely within the Indian film ecosystem.  He’s not a household name in Iowa, but he’s a cultural institution — if not a God — to roughly a billion people.

South India's Surge

Shah Rukh Khan is one of the biggest celebrities in the world

Here’s the part of the story that most Americans missed entirely, and that Indians in Mumbai are still coming to terms with.

Historically, Bollywood dominated Indian cinema because Hindi is understood in almost three-quarters of India, giving it a built-in national audience that regional-language films couldn’t match.

South Indian films — Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam — were largely confined to their home states, regional players catering to regional audiences.

That changed with Baahubali.

A Telugu-language epic called Baahubali: The Beginning was released in 2015 simultaneously across 4,000 screens with a Hindi dubbed version — the first Telugu film to attempt a truly national release, featuring no recognizable stars for the Hindi viewer and a budget that the producers themselves called a massive gamble.

It became the biggest Indian film of its time.  Its sequel, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, collected the equivalent of roughly $25 million on its first day of release alone.

Then came RRR in 2022 — another Rajamouli Telugu epic, set in British India, featuring two leads that most of the country barely knew.  It became a global streaming phenomenon and won an Academy Award for the song “Naatu Naatu.”  And then another hit after that.

The numbers tell the story plainly: in 2019, Hindi releases sold 341 million tickets.  By 2022, that number had plummeted to 189 million.  Over the same period, Telugu films went from 182 million tickets sold to 233 million.

Bollywood didn’t disappear, but it’s no longer the default dominant player in its own country.

The Telugu industry in particular has carved out its own identity by leaning toward star-driven spectacle and large-scale epics — and it operates out of Hyderabad, home to Ramoji Film City, certified by Guinness World Records as the largest film studio complex in the world at over 1,666 acres.

Hollywood doesn’t have anything close to that.

Hollywood vs. Indian Cinema: The Real Comparison

Hollywood operates primarily as an export industry.  It produces films engineered to travel — universal enough in theme and execution to sell tickets in 50 countries simultaneously.  The Marvel formula, the action blockbuster, the prestige drama — all calibrated to transcend cultural specificity.

Indian cinema historically operated the opposite way.  Its films are deeply embedded in specific cultural, religious, and linguistic contexts — speaking to audiences for whom those references carry enormous emotional weight.  This is both its greatest strength and its historical limitation.  The emotional depth available to a filmmaker working in a shared cultural language is extraordinary.  The transferability of that depth to audiences who don’t share that language has always been the ceiling.

That ceiling is now being challenged in two ways: by the organic global breakthrough of films like RRR, and by artificial intelligence.

The AI Factor

Studios in India are deploying AI at a scale unseen elsewhere — creating full-fledged AI-generated films, using AI dubbing to release movies in numerous languages, and recutting endings of older titles to generate additional revenue.  Production costs have plummeted to one-fifth of traditional filmmaking expenses, and production timelines are down to a quarter of what they were.  Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia have all made early bets by partnering with Indian filmmakers and studios.

The language barrier — historically the most significant obstacle to Indian cinema’s global reach — is precisely where AI has the most to offer.  India has 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects, and new AI-powered dubbing tools can now synchronize lip movements with translated audio, making films appear naturally spoken in different languages.  The same technology that has begun dissolving India’s internal language barriers works just as well for English, Spanish, Arabic, or Mandarin.

One film researcher at Britain’s University of Reading put it plainly: “If they can deliver, then the shift in AI filmmaking will be to India.”

The contrast with Hollywood is significant.  In Hollywood, AI alterations to an actor’s performance require informed consent under agreements with SAG-AFTRA.  Indian studios face no equivalent constraints, giving them significantly more freedom to experiment at scale.

Whether that freedom comes at a creative or ethical cost is a legitimate debate — an AI-generated adaptation of the Hindu epic Mahabharat drew over 26.5 million views on JioStar but received a 1.4 rating on IMDb, with viewers citing lip-sync errors and lack of authenticity.  The technology is real.  The audience reaction is complicated.

Could Indian Cinema Overtake Hollywood?

Indian cinema isn’t on track to overtake Hollywood in the obvious way.  Hollywood’s global dominance is built on more than good movies — a century of institutional advantage, English as the default language of global commerce, and distribution infrastructure that Indian cinema is still building.

The more interesting question is whether Indian cinema — all of it, not just Bollywood — can become a genuinely global cinema rather than a collection of regional ones.  RRR suggested that the answer might be yes, if the right film finds the right moment.  AI suggests that the language barrier, the most structural obstacle to that happening at scale, is genuinely solvable.

What Hollywood took a century to build globally, Indian cinema may need only a good algorithm and the right movie.