The overseas box office: how the diaspora became Bollywood's other homeland

Why a Mumbai film now lives or dies in London and Dubai

That changed how films were made and released. A strong opening in the diaspora's cinemas — the multiplexes of New Jersey and the Bay Area, London's cineplexes, the halls of the Gulf — could carry a film that stumbled at home, or confirm a hit. Producers began building overseas distribution into the plan from the start, as the record of top-grossing overseas releases shows, rather than selling the rights off cheaply as an extra.

The films that travelled

Not every big overseas number is a diaspora number, and the distinction matters. Dangal (2016) took the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars abroad — but the vast bulk came from China and a general audience, not from overseas Indians. The diaspora's own blockbusters are a different list: the glossy family films of Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Kal Ho Naa Ho, and later the Aamir Khan message-movies 3 Idiots (2009) and PK (2014), which the diaspora turned out for in numbers that made them overseas landmarks. The diaspora market and the general foreign market are not the same thing, and Indian producers have learned to court both.

The Gulf takes the lead

In the last decade the centre of gravity has shifted from the Anglophone West to the Gulf. The GCC states, led by the United Arab Emirates and its millions of South Asian workers, have become the single biggest overseas earner for many Hindi films — contributing, by industry estimates, somewhere between a fifth and a third of a film's total overseas gross, with the Gulf's annual box office for Indian cinema estimated at around 100 million dollars by the mid-2020s. The strategic weight of the region is now such that producers routinely release films in the Gulf on a Thursday, a day ahead of India, to read the response: a strong opening in Dubai or Abu Dhabi has become a bellwether for how a film will play worldwide.

The South Indian surge

The biggest change to the overseas map has come from the south. For decades "Indian cinema abroad" meant Hindi cinema. Then came the Telugu spectacles — Baahubali: The Conclusion (2017), RRR (2022) — and the Kannada KGF films, which not only travelled but often out-earned Bollywood overseas, powered first by the large South Indian diaspora in the United States and the Gulf, and then by audiences with no connection to India at all. The Tamil and Telugu communities, long treated as a footnote to the Hindi-film market, turned out to be one of its most powerful engines — and helped shift the centre of Indian cinema's global ambition several hundred miles south of Mumbai.

The streaming question

The theatrical overseas market now competes with the phone. Netflix, Amazon Prime and the Indian platforms make new films and series available to the diaspora at home, often within weeks of release, thinning some of the old first-weekend cinema crowds. But the big event films — the RRRs, the Pathaans — have if anything grown, because the diaspora still wants the communal experience of the opening-night hall: the whistles, the front-row dancing, the feeling of home reassembled for three hours in a multiplex in Edison or Dubai. Streaming took the ordinary films; the theatre kept the festivals. And the festival, for the diaspora, was always the point — the film was half the reason to go; the other half was the room full of people who had also come a long way from home.

From homesickness to crossover

The most interesting recent turn is that the diaspora audience has stopped being the whole story and become the seed of a bigger one. RRR (2022), the Telugu epic, earned roughly 50 million dollars overseas — and much of that came not from a captive diaspora but from the buzz the diaspora generated: social-media fandom, sing-along screenings and awards campaigns that pulled in viewers who had never watched an Indian film before, and carried the film to an Academy Award for its song. The overseas market that began as homesickness is turning into genuine crossover.

The audience that co-writes the film

The lesson of the overseas box office is that the diaspora does not merely consume Indian cinema; it shapes it. The NRI film existed because the diaspora would pay for it. The simultaneous worldwide release, the Gulf-first strategy, the glossier production values pitched at an audience with disposable income — all of it is the diaspora's wallet reaching back into the writers' room in Mumbai. For an industry that once treated the overseas Indian as a sentimental afterthought, the audience abroad has become something closer to a co-author. It is a striking inversion. The diaspora left India in search of a better life; a century later, its cinemas and its spending help decide which Indian films get made, and how they look. The people who went away are now, from a distance, helping to write home.

Part 5 of The Diaspora Screen*. On the vast Indian community that made the Gulf a cinema economy, see our Gulf NRI money guide; and Part 1: the NRI film.*