As soon as upon a time, streaming was the promised land. In India, the place unbiased filmmakers had lengthy been ignored by the theaters, platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, JioHotstar (the amalgamated Jio Cinema and Disney+Hotstar), ZEE5 and SonyLIV grew to become one thing of a lifeline. “It felt like we may lastly inform our tales with out preventing the identical gatekeepers,” says Sumanth Bhat, director of the Kannada-language drama Mithya. “We thought we had discovered our place.”
Again then, streamers appeared hungry for movies and filmmakers who weren’t afraid to take dangers. Netflix picked up the delicate coming-of-age drama Axone, the haunting Meel Patthar and Chaitanya Tamhane’s acclaimed The Disciple. However someplace alongside the way in which, particularly within the wake of the pandemic, that urge for food vanished.
After years in IT and design, Bhat shut down two profitable corporations in early 2020, believing the time had lastly come to make movies. “I had harbored this dream for over 15 years, trusting the OTTs [over the top, or streaming] — they usually have been really commissioning movies again then.” Then the pandemic hit. “By the point we recovered from that, the complete ecosystem had modified.”
In 2023, Jayant Digambar Somalkar made Sthal, a modest Marathi-language movie set in a small village and instructed with beautiful restraint. It premiered at Toronto and gained the NETPAC award for finest movie. Bhat’s Mithya performed on the MAMI Mumbai Movie Competition and traveled to a number of others. Harshad Nalawade’s Follower debuted on the Worldwide Movie Competition Rotterdam. All indie movies, all made in 2023. All three launched in Indian theaters in 2025.
“I made Mithya for the OTT house. I by no means considered a theatrical launch,” Bhat says. “We will’t be delusional. A movie like this has an viewers nevertheless it might not be a theatrical viewers. However that’s the mandate now: You must do a theatrical run for OTTs to even think about your movie. It’s only for consideration. There’s no assurance they’ll purchase it. However you continue to must spend on advertising and distribution — generally as a lot as your manufacturing finances.”
The filmmakers are actually confronted with a paradox: They’re pressured to enter a system that has already rejected them, simply to achieve entry to a platform that after existed to bypass that very system.
Filmmaker Rohan Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda, a young, offbeat queer drama, made historical past earlier this yr as the primary Marathi movie ever to premiere at Sundance. The movie went on to win the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic on the occasion.
However Kanawade, even in triumph, is anxious. “What it took to make that movie was 5 years of our life. And the primary producer needed to mortgage his home,” he says. “I actually needed to benefit from the journey of creating my first movie, however I couldn’t. What if it doesn’t get a theatrical launch? Or what if streamers don’t take it?”
And even when movies clear the primary hurdle — surviving at theaters and getting a streamer to select it up — there’s nonetheless no promise of security. “On the subject of Marathi-language or different regional movies, there are only a few consumers,” says Sthal director Somalkar. “Zee and Sony function on income share. Amazon and Netflix not often purchase them. Even JioHotstar follows the revenue-share mannequin.”
Within the revenue-share mannequin, streamers host the movie and pay the filmmaker a small quantity — sometimes 5 cents to 9 cents per view or per hour watched — primarily based on viewers consumption.
If all of this wasn’t dispiriting sufficient for the indie filmmaker in India, there’s a brand new twist: A supply in film advertising tells THR India that some streaming platforms are asking filmmakers to pay them to host their movies.
“That is completely ridiculous,” says Nalawade. “What’s streaming charging for? Cloud storage?” He laughs, in disbelief. “It’s only a huge arduous drive.”
THR India reached out to streaming platforms Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, ZEE5, JioHotstar and SonyLIV to ask what steps — if any — are being taken to help and even acknowledge the indie movie disaster in India. All platforms declined to remark.