“Among the various languages a pan-India southern hit is dubbed, it is the Hindi dubbed version which fetches the highest revenue to a producer given its reach,” said Ramesh Bala, an entertainment sector analyst based in Chennai. A southern film can sell streaming and satellite rights separately for each dubbed language. For instance, the satellite and digital rights of a film originally made in Telugu and dubbed in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam can be sold separately to television channels and streaming platforms.
G Dhananjeyan, cofounder of Tamil Nadu-based production house Creative Entertainers & Distributors, said the 2017 movie, Baahubali: The Conclusion, opened the eyes of southern producers to an additional source of revenue: theatre release of a dubbed version in Hindi.Over the past seven years, southern films such as KGF: Chapter 2 (2022), Kantara (2022), RRR (2022) and Kalki 2898 AD (2024), which have succeeded on a pan-India level, have consciously followed this strategy. The dubbed Hindi version of Baahubali: The Conclusion recorded lifetime box-office collections of ₹510.90 crore. The satellite rights of the Hindi dubbed version were sold to Sony TV Network for ₹51 crore, while its digital rights were sold to Netflix for ₹25.5 crore.
A large part of the success of these southern films can be traced back to the early acceptance of dubbed southern films on television. Ameya Naik, a producer and founder of event management company Fantasy Films, said: “Pan-India channels such as Zee TV laid the foundation for a pan-India southern hit. The channel bought dubbed southern films as there was a potential audience for them. Then, the emergence of YouTube channels such as Goldmines Telefilms fuelled the interest of North Indian audiences in dubbed southern films.”
This increasing acceptance in the North also led to a new trend: southern films featuring Bollywood stars. Examples include Ajay Devgn (RRR), Sanjay Dutt and Raveena Tandon (KGF: Chapter 2) and Amitabh Bachchan (Kalki 2898 AD).
