Why Tamil cinema struggles to post Rs 1,000 cr hit years after Telugu cinema achieved feat

4 min readJun 29, 2026 05:50 PM IST

Producer Ishari K Ganesh has weighed in on why no Tamil film has crossed the ₹1,000 crore mark at the box office, pointing to the state's limited number of screens.

Producer Ishari K Ganesh has weighed in on one of Tamil cinema’s most persistent pain points, why the industry has yet to produce a film that will cross Rs 1,000 crore at the box office, pointing to a basic infrastructure gap rather than any shortfall in content or talent.

“We have only 1,000 screens in Tamil Nadu, whereas Andhra has over 4,000 screens. That’s why they can cross Rs 1,000 crore (at the box office),” Ganesh in a media interaction on Sunday.

The remark touches on a frustration that has built up in Tamil film circles as Telugu and Kannada cinema have each produced multiple films crossing the Rs 1,000 crore mark in recent years, while Tamil cinema’s biggest hit by some distance. 2.0, the Shankar directed Rajinikanth and Akshay Kumar film often counted among Tamil cinema’s biggest spectacles, tops out at Rs 691 crore worldwide, the closest any predominantly Tamil production has come to the kind of numbers Telugu and Kannada cinema have managed with films like Baahubali 2 and KGF Chapter 2, both of which separately cross the Rs 1,000 crore mark on Sacnilk’s tracker.

Rajinikanth’s Jailer, has topped out at a worldwide gross of Rs 604 crores, leaving a substantial gap even at the very top of the industry’s box office charts. Coolie, the 2025 release, follows at Rs 518 crore, with Ponniyin Selvan: Part One at Rs 488.36 crore and The Greatest of All Time at Rs 457.12 crore rounding out the top tier

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Is it only infrastructure?

Screen count is only part of a wider structural issue the industry has been grappling with, one closely tied to how cinema tickets are priced in Tamil Nadu. The state government has capped ticket prices for decades, a policy meant to keep cinema affordable as part of the state’s broader cultural identity. The cap was last revised in 2021, after producers briefly halted new releases over a dispute involving local body taxes, raising the base fare for larger multiplexes to around Rs 150 before GST, working out to roughly Rs 192 with tax included, up from a long standing Rs 120 ceiling that had been there since 2007.

Actor Sivakarthikeyan addressed this directly last year, arguing that the Rs 1,000 crore conversation isn’t only about how many screens a film can play on, but also about how much each ticket actually earns, since a film can sell a similar number of tickets in Tamil Nadu as it would elsewhere and still post noticeably smaller collections purely because of the price gap. “Apart from the quality of a film, there are other factors to consider, such as ticket pricing. I am not in favour of increasing the ticket prices, but if we charged like in Bengaluru or Mumbai, then Jailer would have easily crossed Rs 800 crores, if not Rs 1000 crores,” he remarked in an interview with Cinema Express.

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Ganesh, who runs Vels Film International and has backed several major Tamil hits over the years, also holds a prominent position within the industry’s trade and exhibition circles, which lends his comments added weight even as the precise figures behind them remain open to question. With Tamil cinema’s own benchmark currently sitting at Leo’s Rs 606 crore, well under two thirds of the way to ₹1,000 crore, the conversation around screens, ticket pricing and market size looks set to keep resurfacing with each new big budget release that falls short of the mark.