The South is eating OTT’s lunch — Bollywood isn’t the main course anymore

Once built around a Bollywood-first script, India’s streaming economy now finds its biggest growth engines and creative bets firmly rooted in the southern states, finds Javed Farooqui.

Over the last decade t he gravitational pull of India’s entertainment economy has shi fted unmistakably southward. What began as sporadic national curiosity, gradually swelled into a full-blown cultural crossover. When Naatu Naatu from the Ram Charan-NTR Jr starrer RRR lit up the Oscar stage, it signalled that southern cinema was no longer rising quietly; it was asserting itself at the centre of India’s mainstream imagination.