Cinema of South India

Cinema of South India, refers to the cinema of the four major film industries in South India; primarily engaged in making feature films in the four major languages of the region, namely — Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. They are often colloquially referred to as Tollywood, Kollywood, Sandalwood and Mollywood, respectively.

Although the four industries developed independently for a long period of time, gross exchange of artists and technicians, as well as globalisation helped to shape this new identity.^[1] By 2010, South India became the home for 6320, or about 62% of the 10,167 cinema theatres in India.^[2]

For the financial year of 2013, the combined net box office revenue of Tamil and Telugu film industries stood at 36% of the total net revenue of Indian cinema.^[3] In 2021, the combined domestic box-office of the four South Indian film industries totalled ₹2,400 crore, surpassing that of Hindi film markets, where box office collection stood at ₹800 crore.^[4] In 2021, Telugu film industry emerged as the largest film industry of India in terms of box office revenue.^[5][6][7]

Setting aside state language boundaries, the beginning of the year 2022 saw South Indian actors, writers and directors from Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada industries collaborating with each other as a single 'South Indian Cinema' entity to produce movies. This collaboration resulted in major hits such as 'Vikram', 'Jailer', 'Pushpa', 'Leo' and 'Salaar'. Critics say that this marks the beginning of the unification of a pan-South Indian film industry as one.^[8] After the emergence of South Indian Cinema, Hindi film actors and actresses who experienced a decline in their star value began participating in South Indian films to sustain their careers in the industry^[9]