Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

On Tuesday, Rishab Shetty, the director and star of the smash 2022 box office hit Kantara, was plastered all over national news. 

The reason: a prequel announcement for the Kannada-language film—which had been set in the coastal region of the Indian state of Karnataka and dealt with, among other themes, the region’s traditional belief systems and the clashes of interest arising over local forests. 

A few years ago, this sort of national media attention for a Kannada film would have been unimaginable, despite the Kannada art world’s storied history of having produced some very tall stalwarts like Girish Karnad and Girish Kasaravalli—both critically acclaimed writer-directors. 

And this isn’t a phenomenon specific to the Kannada movie industry. It feels like in the recent past, films in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam have found acceptance like never before across the country—both at the box office and on OTT platforms. 

Audiences being more open to consuming content made in other languages (subbed or dubbed) helps the big OTT players, sure. Wider base to draw from, better chances of quality hits, etc, etc. But it’s also opened a door for the many smaller OTT players who’ve sprung up around regional language media—focused on one or two states, perhaps, and people who speak that particular language in other states and abroad. 

But it’s not a very wide door. And they probably won’t be able to squeeze through anytime soon.

A national opportunity for regional OTT apps…

For a long while, Hindi films, or Bollywood if you’d like to call it that, commanded the single largest box office share among all the many film industries in India. By a large margin. 

But last year, Hindi films reportedly grossed just over Rs 2,000 crore (~US$240 million) at the box-office in 2022. Meanwhile, two hits from the Southern region—the Kannada hit KGF 2 (from the same production house that released Kantara) and the Telugu hit RRR—grossed Rs 1,228 crore (~US$149 million) and Rs 1,183 crore (US$143 million) respectively, according to IMDb data.

And though we don’t have similar figures for OTT, my conversations with executives across major OTT platforms like Hotstar and Amazon Prime over the past year have made it clear that non-Hindi films are important for business now. According to an EY-FICCI report on India’s film sector for 2021, 69% of films released on OTT platforms in the country were already in “other” (non-Hindi) languages, “primarily south Indian languages”. And 47% of OTT originals. 

Regional language cinema going online has opened up the field for the plethora of smaller OTT platforms I mentioned at the start.