There was a time when watching an Indian film in a language other than Hindi could almost feel like stepping into a different part of Indian cinema, such was the perception surrounding it. The language itself created a boundary.
A Telugu film belonged to Telugu audiences. A Malayalam film belonged to Kerala. A Marathi film was largely watched in Maharashtra. And while these industries had their own stars, their own histories, and their own loyal audiences, Hindi cinema had something that the others were still trying to reach, a much larger national audience.
Over the past decade, that boundary has slowly begun to disappear.
Today, a film does not necessarily need to be in Hindi to become a film that the Hindi-speaking audience is waiting for. A Telugu film can become a nationwide event. A Kannada film can make audiences curious about a culture they may have never encountered through cinema before, and likewise for the other regional films.
Regional cinema has not just grown. It has travelled. And somewhere along the way, it has entered a space that Hindi cinema had occupied almost by default.
A part of this change came from technology. Filmmaking technology became more accessible, visual effects became more sophisticated, and filmmakers could imagine films on a scale that was once difficult to achieve outside the biggest Hindi productions. Multiplexes created more space for films in different languages, while OTT platforms made it possible for someone sitting in Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru to discover a film made in a language they did not understand.
But technology only made the door easier to open. It was the films that made audiences walk through it.
The South became the most visible example of this change. When S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Beginning arrived in 2015, there was something different about the way audiences outside Andhra Pradesh and Telangana responded to it. It was a Telugu film, but it did not feel confined to being one. Its scale, its world, and its storytelling made people want to see what Indian cinema could create outside the usual Hindi framework.
Then came Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017). The film’s Hindi version went on to cross the domestic lifetime collection of Dangal (2016), becoming the highest-grossing Hindi film at the time. It was still a Telugu film. The difference was that its audience had become much bigger than its language. That moment was important because it changed the direction in which the audience was moving.
Earlier, regional cinema often travelled towards Hindi cinema. Now, Hindi audiences were beginning to travel towards regional cinema.
And once that happened, there was no reason for Baahubali to remain an isolated example. KGF, Kantara (2022), RRR (2022), Pushpa, and Kalki 2898 AD (2024) followed, each in its own way showing that a film could remain deeply rooted in its language and culture while finding an audience far beyond it.
RRR did not have to stop being Telugu cinema to become a film watched across India and eventually across the world. Kantara, a Kannada film from the Kannada film industry, brought the folklore and traditions of coastal Karnataka into a much larger conversation. Pushpa created a character and a world that audiences in the Hindi-speaking market embraced without needing that world to be made familiar first.
And then Pushpa 2: The Rule made the scale of this shift difficult to ignore. In 2024, its Hindi version alone collected around ₹889 crore in India, while the film became the highest-grossing Indian film of the year. A film made in Telugu had become one of the biggest films in what had traditionally been considered the Hindi market. But what makes the rise of regional cinema so striking is that every industry has found its own way of travelling.
Telugu cinema found enormous audiences through scale and spectacle. Malayalam cinema did almost the opposite. It showed that a film did not need to become bigger to become more visible. Sometimes, it only needed to become more honest about where it came from.
Malayalam cinema had always carried a reputation for strong writing, layered characters, and realism. But over the last decade, that reputation began reaching audiences far beyond Kerala. Drishyam (2013) became one of the clearest examples, with its story travelling into other languages and eventually becoming a successful Hindi film starring Ajay Devgn.
But the newer Malayalam wave feels even more compelling. Films such as Premalu (2024), Manjummel Boys (2024), Aavesham (2024), and Bramayugam (2024) found audiences outside Kerala without having to disguise what they were. They could be funny, strange, emotional, dark or deeply rooted in their own surroundings, and audiences elsewhere were willing to enter those worlds.
Malayalam cinema crossed ₹1,000 crore at the Indian box office in 2024, with its share of India’s overall box office doubling from 5 percent in 2023 to 10 percent. But the numbers only tell us that people went to watch these films. What they do not completely explain is why. It might be because regional cinema has slowly made audiences realise that a story does not have to be familiar to feel close.
That same feeling can be seen in Marathi cinema.
For years, Marathi films had a strong audience of their own, but the last decade brought them much further into the national conversation. Lai Bhaari (2014) brought scale and commercial energy, while films such as Natsamrat (2016) and Sairat (2016) showed that Marathi cinema could create theatrical events without losing the identity that made them Marathi films in the first place.
Sairat became a cultural phenomenon. Its story of love, caste, and social divisions reached audiences well beyond Maharashtra and eventually became the Hindi remake Dhadak (2018). But the interesting part was that Hindi cinema came looking for Sairat only after the original had already proved what it could do.
That direction of movement says something about how the relationship between regional and Hindi cinema has changed. Marathi cinema continued that movement with films such as Ved (2022) and Baipan Bhari Deva (2023), which showed that audiences could turn up in large numbers for stories made specifically within their own cultural space.
Gujarati cinema offers another, even more surprising example. Vash (2023) became a successful Gujarati film before its story travelled into Hindi cinema as Shaitaan (2024), starring Ajay Devgn and R. Madhavan. The journey of that story is almost symbolic of what has happened more broadly, something that began within a regional industry was eventually taken into the heart of mainstream Hindi cinema.
And then came Laalo – Krishna Sada Sahaayate. Made on a reported budget of around ₹50 lakh, the Gujarati film crossed ₹100 crore at the box office in 2025, becoming the first Gujarati film to reach that mark. Its success came at a time when Gujarati cinema itself was growing rapidly, with its overall box office reportedly increasing from ₹84 crore in 2024 to ₹242 crore in 2025.
It is easy to look at a number like that and see only a box-office record. But there is something more personal happening underneath it.
People are choosing to watch films in languages that may not be their own. They are not necessarily waiting for the Hindi version anymore. That is probably the biggest change regional cinema has brought to the Indian film audience over the past decade.
For a long time, Hindi cinema had been the industry that regional cinema looked towards when a film was to be taken to a wider audience. Stories travelled from the South into Hindi cinema through remakes. Drishyam (2015), Kabir Singh (2019), Jersey (2022), and Vikram Vedha (2022) are all examples of this long-standing exchange.
But today, the movement is no longer one-way. South Indian stars have built enormous fan bases in Hindi-speaking parts of the country without having to become Hindi film stars first. Prabhas, Yash, and Allu Arjun are known far beyond the languages in which they began their careers. Hindi actors, meanwhile, are increasingly entering South Indian productions, because the audiences have begun to overlap. Even the meaning of a “Hindi market” has started to change.
In 2024, dubbed South Indian films accounted for 31 percent of the Hindi box office, according to Ormax Media. That meant almost a third of the money being collected by films in the Hindi market was coming from films that had originally been made in another language.
That does not mean Hindi cinema has stopped mattering. In fact, Hindi cinema had its strongest year ever at the Indian box office in 2025, according to Ormax, collecting ₹5,504 crore. The share of dubbed South Indian films within the Hindi market also fell considerably that year.
So maybe the change is not really about one cinema replacing another. It is about the audience no longer accepting the old hierarchy.
A Hindi film does not automatically become the national film anymore simply because it is in Hindi. And a regional film does not remain regional simply because of the language it speaks. That is what Baahubali started making visible, what RRR, KGF, Pushpa and Kantara carried forward, and what Malayalam, Marathi and Gujarati cinema have continued to prove in their own respects.
What makes this shift especially significant is that these films did not become successful by leaving their identities behind. They became successful while holding on to them.
For years, Indian cinema was spoken about as though it had one centre and several smaller worlds around it. The past decade has made those worlds harder to keep at the edges. Regional cinema has entered the Hindi market, but more importantly, it has changed the way audiences look at Indian cinema itself.
Today, the language of a film may tell us where it comes from. It, however, no longer has to tell us where it can go.