Bollywood producers make Rs 40 cr when a film does Rs 100 cr box office: Rajkumar Hirani

3 min readMumbaiJun 25, 2026 10:46 AM IST

Rajkumar Hirani explains how producers actually earn money.

Rajkumar Hirani is widely regarded as one of the most successful filmmakers of recent times. In a career spanning over two decades and six films, the writer-director has consistently delivered box office successes. Even his most recent release, Dunki, which otherwise underperformed by his usual standards, still managed to earn over Rs 450 crore globally. Amid this track record, the filmmaker recently sat down to explain the economics of film returns and how producers actually make money in Bollywood.

How does a producer make money?

Hirani explained the various sources of revenue and shared with Sanjay Arora on his YouTube channel, “The first major primary source of revenue is ticket sales, but I want to tell people that when you read figures like a film doing 100 crore business, 200 crore business, or 400 crore business, I will first explain the breakdown of the same.”

Hirani explained that a large portion of box office earnings goes to theatres. “When you talk about a film doing Rs 100 crore business, 50% of it goes to multiplexes. So when you earn Rs 100 crore, the producer does not even get Rs 50 crore. They have different ratios, in the first week the theatres say take 50%, in the second it goes to 60%, in the third 70%, so the major chunk goes to theatres. Because as the weeks pass, footfalls decrease, this has been happening for ages now.”

He added that after theatres, there is the distributor share as well as advertising costs. “After that, there is also the distributor’s share and also advertising costs. So what comes to the producer is around 40%, or sometimes 35%, depending on circumstances. So when you say Rs 100 crore business, that is not what the producer actually earns.”

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Hirani further explained that producers rely on multiple revenue streams beyond theatres. “Then there are different revenue sources like satellite, basically producers selling the film to a TV channel where it will be premiered later, but that has reduced drastically now. Second is OTT and third is music. So primarily, there are these 3-4 sources. The producer has to recover all his cost from all these principal sources and then there is marketing cost also.”

He also noted how marketing budgets have grown over time. “Any film usually has Rs 8 to Rs 10 crore, or say Rs 15–20 crore or Rs 25 crore depending upon how much you want to market. But largely, in today’s time, it is well above Rs 10 crore because it has become increasingly difficult to reach audiences.”

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3 Idiots 2 in writing stage

In other news, the filmmaker also shared an update on the long-awaited sequel to 3 Idiots. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, Hirani revealed that he and longtime collaborator Abhijat Joshi are still developing the script for the follow-up, which will revisit Rancho, Farhan and Raju years after audiences last saw them.

“I’m still working on that script. There is a lot of work left. It’s primarily about what happens to these characters 15–20 years later. It’s not about college or anything. They are married and have children now. They are experiencing mid-life crisis, and so we will have to see, now what next?”