South Films Profit Greatly from Dubbing Rights

According to distributors and industry observers, the sale of streaming and satellite rights for South Indian films produced up to 25% of their revenue in 2024, up from less than 10% seven years prior.

According to trade analysts, streaming behemoth Netflix paid ₹175 crore for the Hindi dubbing of the recently released multilingual movie Kalki 2898 AD. Amazon Prime purchased the movie's southern language dubbing rights for ₹200 crore, they said. According to box office data agency Sacnilk, the streaming rights of all languages for Pushpa 2: The Rule, India's biggest movie, were just sold for ₹275 crore.

According to Ramesh Bala, a Chennai-based entertainment sector analyst, "of all the languages a pan-India southern hit is dubbed, the Hindi dubbed version fetches the highest revenue to a producer given its reach." Each dubbed language's streaming and satellite rights can be sold independently for a Southern film. For example, television broadcasters and streaming services can purchase the digital and satellite rights to a Telugu film that has been dubbed into Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam independently.

The 2017 film Baahubali: The Conclusion, according to G Dhananjeyan, cofounder of the Tamil Nadu-based production company Creative Entertainers & Distributors, introduced southern filmmakers to a new revenue stream: the theatrical distribution of a Hindi-dubbed version.

Southern films that have achieved success on a pan-Indian scale during the last seven years, like KGF: Chapter 2 (2022), Kantara (2022), RRR (2022), and Kalki 2898 AD (2024), have purposefully adhered to this approach. Baahubali: The Conclusion's dubbed Hindi version brought in ₹510.90 crore at the box office over its whole run. Netflix paid ₹25.5 crore for the digital rights of the Hindi-dubbed version, while Sony TV Network paid ₹51 crore for the satellite rights.

The early acceptance of dubbed southern films on television is largely responsible for the success of these films. Producer and Fantasy Films founder Ameya Naik stated: "A pan-India southern hit was made possible by pan-India stations like Zee TV. Due to the possible viewership, the channel purchased dubbed Southern films. Then, North Indian viewers' interest in dubbed southern films was stoked by the rise of YouTube channels like Goldmines Telefilms."

A new tendency that resulted from this growing acceptance in the North was the use of Bollywood actors in southern films. Sanjay Dutt and Raveena Tandon (KGF: Chapter 2), Amitabh Bachchan (Kalki 2898 AD), and Ajay Devgn (RRR) are a few examples.