A deep-dive into how Indian cinema’s biggest hits — and most expensive misses — are made or broken long before release day.
In December 2024, Pushpa 2: The Rule did something that had never been done before in Indian cinema. It sold ₹100 crore worth of advance booking tickets before a single public review — roughly two million tickets — in the days before release. By Day 8, Allu Arjun’s sequel had crossed the lifetime worldwide collection of every other South Indian film released in Hindi that year, combined.
Three months earlier, Amaran opened to ₹35 crore on its very first day — Sivakarthikeyan’s biggest-ever opening — driven not by spectacle but by the emotional weight of a real soldier’s story told with uncommon restraint. A year before that, Kalki 2898 AD’s campaign had begun not with a trailer but with a presence at San Diego Comic-Con and a Times Square billboard — treating a Telugu film as a global IP event on the scale of Marvel.
These are not accidents of talent or fortune. They are the outcomes of deliberate, intelligent positioning.
Meanwhile, Bade Miyan Chote Miyan assembled two of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars, spent generously on production, and returned one of 2024’s most embarrassing box-office results. Jigra earned just ₹30.69 crore lifetime. Sarfira — a film with genuine emotional heft — was buried partly by poor marketing timing, partly because it never found a clear voice.
The Indian film industry grossed $1.36 billion at the domestic box office in 2024 — the second highest on record, yet still a 3% decline from 2023. Within that number, a quiet revolution is underway. Films that get their positioning right are defying every conventional wisdom about star power, language barriers, and marketing budgets. Films that get it wrong are discovering that no amount of promotional spend can rescue a misdirected message.
What positioning actually means — and what it isn’t
There is a persistent confusion in Indian film circles between marketing and positioning. Marketing is the activity — trailers, press tours, brand tie-ups, OOH campaigns. Positioning is the strategy that precedes all of it. It answers one foundational question: in the mind of the audience, what kind of film is this, who is it for, and why does it matter now?
Get the positioning right, and every marketing rupee multiplies in value. Get it wrong, and you can spend ₹50 crore on promotion and still fail to fill a single show in Week 2.
The challenge is that positioning is not decided on release day. By the time a film’s trailer drops, the audience’s perception has already been forming for months. As one industry analysis has bluntly noted, 73% of film marketing budgets are spent after the audience decision is already made. The conversation has been happening without the studio’s participation.
The productions that are winning in today’s India understand this. They don’t treat positioning as a promotional exercise. They treat it as a foundational creative and commercial decision — made at greenlight, not at release.
Case study 1: Amaran — the power of true story positioning
Amaran (2024) is the most instructive Tamil film of the decade — not because it is the biggest, but because it demonstrates what happens when a film’s positioning is rooted in absolute emotional truth.
The story of Major Mukund Varadarajan — a Tamil Nadu native who gave his life fighting terrorists in the line of duty — was not packaged as an action spectacle. It was positioned, from the first announcement to the Diwali release date, as an act of tribute. Co-produced by Raaj Kamal Films International and Sony Pictures Films India, the entire promotional campaign was calibrated around honouring a real hero, not selling a star.
Sivakarthikeyan, who had built his career largely on youth comedies, was positioned in a register he had never occupied before: earnest patriotic sincerity. The marketing leaned into that transformation rather than disguising it. Audiences arrived not expecting the Sivakarthikeyan they knew, but the Sivakarthikeyan they were being invited to see.
The result: ₹35 crore opening day, ₹135 crore opening weekend, ₹300+ crore worldwide. Amaran succeeded because it positioned itself not as entertainment but as meaning. That is a different contract with the audience — and a far more powerful one.
Case study 2: Maharaja — positioning mystery as mass entertainment
Maharaja (2024) was made on a budget of approximately ₹20 crore, including promotion. It became the fourth highest-grossing Tamil film of that year and — remarkably — the highest-grossing South Indian film in China since 2018.
Directed by Nithilan Saminathan and starring Vijay Sethupathi, Maharaja was positioned around a deceptively simple premise: a father seeking justice for his daughter. Its non-linear structure and thriller mechanics were not hidden — they were the selling proposition. What happened to the Maharaja? was the question the campaign planted and refused to answer.
This is a masterclass in using withholding as a positioning strategy. In an era when trailers routinely give away plot points that should be discovered in the theatre, Maharaja created genuine pre-release curiosity — the rarest and most valuable commodity in film marketing. The payoff was word-of-mouth that crossed every language barrier.
Case study 3: The Lokesh Cinematic Universe — positioning as a long game
No conversation about Tamil cinema’s positioning evolution is complete without addressing Lokesh Kanagaraj’s deliberate, systematic construction of the LCU — the Lokesh Cinematic Universe, spanning Kaithi (2019), Master (2021), Vikram (2022), Leo (2023), and Coolie (2025).
What Lokesh has done is the most sophisticated positioning exercise in Tamil cinema history. Each film stands alone; each film also plants connective tissue that rewards the audience that shows up for all of them. The positioning is not “see this film.” It is “join this universe.”
Vikram’s post-credits scene didn’t just tease Leo — it converted every Vikram audience member into a pre-sold ticket holder for the next film. The LCU is a masterclass in using positioning as a compounding asset. The audience’s investment in one film becomes the marketing budget for the next. Tamil cinema is genuinely ahead of every other Indian film industry in understanding that a franchise, properly positioned, is more valuable than any individual blockbuster.
Case study 4: Kalki 2898 AD — engineering a pan-India universe
When Nag Ashwin and Vyjayanthi Movies set out to make Kalki 2898 AD, they faced a novel challenge: a pan-India science fiction epic rooted in Hindu mythology, a genre with no proven playbook in Indian cinema. Their answer was to position it not as a film, but as a cultural event.
The marketing campaign, executed across 366 units in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and Lucknow, deliberately blended mythology and futurism — anamorphic displays, DOOH innovations, and pop-out hoardings that treated the film as an immersive universe. The Bujji Tour created physical, embodied engagement weeks before release. The San Diego Comic-Con launch and Times Square billboard positioned a Telugu film as global IP. The result was one of 2024’s two dominant blockbusters, with a cross-language, cross-demographic audience.
Case study 5: Jawan — engineering desire through star ecosystem
Shah Rukh Khan had returned to the top of Hindi cinema with Pathaan. Jawan’s positioning challenge was to sustain that momentum without it feeling manufactured. The answer: make SRK himself the primary marketing channel.
Eight of the top ten promotional social posts came from Shah Rukh Khan’s own Instagram. Brand integrations — Bisleri’s limited-edition Jawan bottles across 70,000 retail outlets — turned FMCG distribution into promotional infrastructure. The trailer launch on the Burj Khalifa was deliberate theatre. The Jawan prevue generated 112 million views in 24 hours. The film earned ₹88.2 crore on Opening Day — 19% higher than Pathaan’s record. Total worldwide gross: approximately ₹1,160 crore.
The lesson: positioning is not just what you say. It is who says it, where, and what emotional register the message arrives in.
Case study 6: The small-budget revolution — Manjummel Boys & Premalu
Manjummel Boys was made on ₹20 crore. It earned ₹241 crore worldwide — a 12× return. Premalu cost ₹3 crore. It earned ₹135 crore — a 45× return. Malayalam cinema dominated the Indian film industry’s ROI rankings in 2024 not because its budgets were smaller, but because its positioning was more honest.
Manjummel Boys was positioned as a real survival story in a specific place, about a specific kind of friendship, rooted in cultural pride. Premalu was a love story that felt recognizably lived-in. Both trusted their emotional truth — and digital media amplified that truth far beyond their home markets. In 2024, Indian film trailers and promotional content generated over 14 billion views on video platforms. Over 65% of Gen Z audiences discover films through short-form social content.
The cost of getting it wrong
Hindi cinema’s box office dropped 37% in 2024 when dubbed South Indian films are excluded from the calculation. South Indian films — Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam — claimed disproportionate box office share not because they are inherently superior in craft, but because their makers have been more disciplined about what kind of story they are telling, for whom, and why it matters.
If the positioning is wrong and the marketing is speaking to the wrong segment, in the wrong register, on the wrong platforms, the spend doesn’t just underperform — it actively works against the film, signalling to the wrong audience and alienating the right one.
That is a positioning problem, not a talent problem.
Five principles for Indian cinema’s next chapter
1. Positioning must be decided at greenlight, not at release. The audience conversation begins the moment a film is announced. Productions that engage with that conversation from the start arrive at release with a primed audience.
2. Authenticity is the only sustainable differentiator. Audiences are extraordinarily good at detecting inauthenticity. Films positioned in their true register — even niche, regional, or genre-specific — find their audience.
3. Star power amplifies positioning; it cannot replace it. Jawan worked because SRK’s voice aligned with the film’s emotional content. Bade Miyan Chote Miyan failed because two enormous stars were attached to a film with no clear emotional proposition.
4. Tamil cinema’s universe-building is the model to study. The LCU is not just a creative achievement — it is the most sophisticated long-term positioning strategy in Indian cinema today. A franchise, properly built, becomes its own marketing infrastructure.
5. Regional is the new pan-India. The most successful positioning of 2024 started from a specific cultural truth and expanded outward. The attempt to engineer pan-India appeal from the centre, without cultural specificity, is increasingly a losing strategy.
Indian cinema — Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi — has the talent, the infrastructure, the global appetite, and the cultural richness to compete at the highest level of world cinema.
What it needs is a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of positioning as a creative and commercial discipline. The best filmmakers already understand this. They know that a film’s story begins not in the script, but in the answer to a simple question: Who needs to see this film, and why?
Everything else — the trailer, the campaign, the brand tie-up, the OTT deal, the screen count — flows from that answer.
Get the answer right, and the audience will find you. Get it wrong, and no amount of money will find them.
— Elango Raghupathy
Producer · Co-Founder, Karuvachy Films · elangoraghupathy.com