Indian Cinema, often loosely defined as ‘Bollywood,’ has much more to it than meets the eye. The films in India are produced in over 20 languages and an equal number of dialects. However, the mainstream cinema of Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu languages is generally considered financially viable and offers great opportunities.

This millennium has seen Indian Feature Films and even web series reaching foreign shores. We began this experiment when we took Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film Devdas and its star cast, which included Aishwarya Rai, to participate in a special screening at Cannes Film Festival in 2002. The idea then was to expose the mainstream larger-than-life cinema to western audiences. The experiment succeeded and today, Aishwarya Rai, Irrfan, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Shahrukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anupam Kher, and many others are well-known names in Hollywood.

What this means in commercial terms is that the reach of audiences watching this type of content has extended to over 80 countries. Apart from the Indian diaspora, the films have been able to make inroads into a chunk hitherto reserved for foreign cinema. Consequently, the Indian films that are made on budgets ranging from $2-20 million (USD) are reaching out to a far wider audience and returning huge profits. Recently, RRR returned a net of over $140 million, and Pathan made $100 million in less than two weeks of release.

The figures speak volumes about the Return on Investment that Indian films offer. The scenario as it stands today can easily offer a consistent ROI of anything between 15-18% per annum. India today is the right time and destination to enter before the budgets begin to zoom up and profits begin to shrink. Any player with a small fund of $20-100 million can easily extract a great ROI and valuation from Indian cinema.

Were we to look at the size of the Media and Entertainment Industry, India produces over 2000 features, 10,000 shorts, 5,000 advertising films, 5,000 music albums, and over 500 web series each year. The industry is home to over 1,000 Television networks, 200 Radio Stations, and thousands of event management companies that also need film content. India allows up to 100% Foreign Direct Investment in the film industry (i.e., film financing, production, distribution, exhibition, marketing, and associated activities relating to the film industry, the only conditions being the companies should have an established track record in films, TV, music, and finance. They should have a minimum paid-up capital of $10 million if it is the single largest equity shareholder and at least $5 million in other cases. The minimum level of foreign equity investment should be $2.5 million for the single largest equity shareholder and $1 million in other cases.

Indian cinema right now is in its nascent stage of international presence and offers great possibilities and rewarding opportunities not only in producing films but also in the Studio business and the film festival business. If you're not already paying attention to it, you should be.

For more on this topic, be sure to check out this piece on Indian Cinema.

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