Our monthly feature The India Box Office Report tracks the performance of the various films released every month at the Indian (domestic) box office. In this mid-year edition, we look at the overall performance of the Indian box office in the six-month period, from January to June 2023.

Cumulative Box Office: Jan-Jun 2023

The box office crossed the ₹1,000 Cr threshold in June 2023, aided by the strong opening of multi-lingual Adipurush, and creditable box office performance of Zara Hatke Zara Bachke (Hindi), Carry On Jatta 3 (Punjabi), Baipan Bhaari Deva (Marathi) and Maamannan (Tamil). This makes June 2023 the second-best month of the year so far at the box office, behind January, which was driven by the exceptional box office performance of Pathaan.

The cumulative box office for Jan-Jun releases stands at ₹4,868 Cr, which is 15% lower than the same period in 2022. At this rate, 2023 is expected to end at ₹9,736 Cr, which will be 8% lower than the annual 2022 box office of ₹10,637 Cr. However, the second half of 2023 has a strong lineup of films that are expected to perform well, especially Jawan, Salaar, and Tiger 3. This puts the year in good stead to surpass the 2022 gross box office, or at least get very close to it.

The all-time record is held by 2019, which closed at ₹10,948 Cr, followed by 2022, which is the only other year when the ₹10,000 Cr mark was surpassed. If 2023 crosses that mark, two back-to-back years higher than ₹10,000 Cr will be a definitive confirmation that Indian box office is alive and kicking, even though the kind of films that are delivering may have changed since the pandemic.

Top 10 Films (Jan-Jun 2023)

January release Pathaan is the top film in the first half of 2023, with its box office being almost double of the second-highest grosser of the year. Pathaan alone has contributed over 13% of the overall collections thus far in the year. Adipurush, despite multiple controversies, and poor audience likability, takes the second spot, on the strength of its huge opening in Telugu and Hindi markets. Fast X is the only Hollywood film to feature in top 10 films list at the end of June 2023.

Language Share

For language share calculation, language-wise box office of films releasing in multiple languages is assigned to the corresponding language. However, for Hollywood, the data for all languages is reported under the language head ‘Hollywood’.

The success of K.G.F: Chapter 2 and RRR resulted in the combined language share of the four South Indian languages being 50% in 2022, with Hindi being only 33% (including a sizeable contribution from dubbed versions of the two films mentioned above). In 2023 so far, Hindi language's share has gone up to 37%, while the South languages share has dropped from 50% to 44%, largely because of a steep drop in Kannada language's share, from 8% (2022) to 2% (Jan-Jun 2023).

How to read the numbers in this report?

Different language industries follow different reporting conventions (Gross, Nett or Share). We have used Gross Box Office as the unified measure for this report. For films releasing in multiple languages, collections are added up across languages to arrive at the film’s Gross Box Office at an all-India level.

Some films may be running in theatres at the time of publishing this report every month. For these films, Gross Box Office is estimated based on the latest trends available. Hence, it is normal that some numbers may be updated in the following month’s report, once actual collections have been estimated.

Numbers for a film are assigned to the month of its release, even if the business is spread over two or more months. For example, Pathaan released on January 25, 2023, and a sizeable component of the film’s business was registered in February 2023. However, in the analysis, Pathaan's entire box office has been credited to the month of January.

Monthly reports are published on this website in the third week of the following month. You can access the previous reports in the Insights section of this website.

If the numbers for your film do not match those in our report, we will be happy to get information from you on the same, and update the report. You can mail us at [email protected].