Disney’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” has surpassed stablemate “Avengers: Endgame” to become the highest-grossing Hollywood film of all time in India.
According to figures released by Disney, James Cameron’s return to Pandora is still playing in Indian theatres and has a running total of INR 4.6 billion ($56.6 million), surpassing the Russo brothers’ Marvel epic, which finished its run in the nation with INR 4.3 billion ($53.6 million).
The top 10 Hollywood films of all time in India are primarily Disney productions, including “Avengers: Infinity War” (2018), “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), “The Jungle Book” (2016), “The Lion King” (2019), “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (2022), and “Avatar” (2009). Only “Furious 7” from Universal, which is ranked seventh, and “Jurassic World” (2015), which is ranked tenth, are two of the films that are not a part of the Disney giant.
Disney Star India Studios Head, Bikram Duggal said, “The phenomenal response in India to James Cameron’s unparalleled creative vision is testimony to how cultural, geographical and language barriers blur when it comes to pathbreaking storytelling and an immersive cinematic experience. Audiences have eagerly waited for the sequel and they have been emotionally invested in the story. The first ‘Avatar’ did exceptionally well in India and we definitely expected ‘Avatar: The Way Of Water’ to set newer box office benchmarks, but witnessing the extraordinary response of audiences across the country has been remarkable.”
There are just two Hollywood films on India’s top 10 all-time box office list, “Avatar: The Way of Water” in eighth place and “Avengers: Endgame” in tenth. If “Avatar 2” maintains its present course, it will shortly surpass “PK” (2014), starring Aamir Khan, which is now in seventh place with a total of INR 4.7 billion.
Hollywood blockbusters are widely distributed in India and are dubbed into a broad range of regional languages, especially for franchises, superhero movies, and creature features. They made up 15% of the box office in the year before the pandemic in 2019, but that percentage dropped to an average of 11% in 2021.
The economy is expanding. This is due to “all the effort that both Disney as well as other studios put in to make sure that we were marketing these movies to a very wide mainstream audience,” as former Disney CEO Siddharth Roy Kapur stated in a recent interview.
