Twenty years of Bollywood overseas grosses, charted

The received wisdom is that the overseas market has grown steadily and continuously for two decades. The data is more interesting than that: growth has been real, but it has been concentrated in a shrinking number of titles.

The headline finding

Total overseas gross across all Hindi releases has roughly tripled since 2006. Over the same period, the number of individual films clearing $5m overseas in a given year has stayed close to flat. The market got bigger; it did not get broader.

That last column is the story. The single highest-grossing Hindi film overseas now accounts for roughly a third of the entire category's overseas revenue in a typical year, up from about a seventh twenty years ago.

What is driving the concentration

Two things, working in the same direction. Streaming absorbed the mid-budget overseas theatrical audience almost entirely: a film that would once have played four weeks to modest but real diaspora crowds now waits eight weeks and arrives on a subscription service instead. And event-scale releases have become better at converting the casual diaspora viewer, who previously attended two or three Hindi films a year and now attends one.

Method and caveats

Figures are compiled from distributor reporting and trade press, converted at the annual average USD rate rather than the rate at release. Territory definitions changed twice in the period and we have normalised to the current one. Where sources conflicted by more than 10% we excluded the title; forty-one releases were dropped on that basis.

The full dataset is available on request, write to the editorial desk.