In April 2022, KGF: Chapter 2 — a Kannada-language period gangster film from Bengaluru — opened to collections of ₹134 crore on its first day. In Hindi. Not in Kannada. In Hindi, a language the director does not speak natively, in a market where Kannada films had barely registered before 2018. By the time it finished its theatrical run, KGF 2 had earned approximately ₹1,250 crore worldwide, becoming one of the ten highest-grossing Indian films of all time.

Something had shifted. Not just commercially — cinematically. The technology, the craft, the international collaborations, and the cultural ambition behind a new generation of South Indian blockbusters had reached a point where they could no longer be dismissed as regional curiosities. They were, and are, redefining what Indian cinema looks like, sounds like, and is capable of.

This is a deep examination of how these films are actually made — the cameras, the VFX pipelines, the production technology, the international crews — and what their collective success means for India’s cultural moment.

The Technology Behind the Frames

KGF: Darkness as Aesthetic, ARRI as Instrument

When cinematographer Bhuvan Gowda was asked whether he used advanced equipment for KGF: Chapter 1, his answer was disarmingly direct: no. “Basically, Prashanth Neel likes scenes closer to reality,” he told International Business Times India. “Whatever we see with our bare eyes should reflect on-screen.”

What Gowda used — and used exceptionally well — was the ARRI Alexa SXT camera with Master Prime lenses. The choice was deliberate. The Alexa’s colour science and extraordinary dynamic range allowed the team to shoot predominantly in low light, with fire as a primary source of illumination, without losing detail in the shadows — the visual grammar that gives KGF its characteristic half-dark, half-mythological texture.

Approximately 40 percent of shooting in KGF was done with over-the-shoulder handheld shots, with steady-cam used only where essential. Jimmy jibs — the camera-crane systems used for sweeping aerial perspectives in conventional blockbusters — were minimised. Gowda carried the camera himself for many shots. The resulting footage felt immediate, present, and visceral in a way that polished crane work would not have achieved.

For KGF: Chapter 2, the same visual philosophy was retained, scaled dramatically in production ambition. The film’s ₹100 crore budget made it the most expensive Kannada film ever produced at the time of release — a record it held until Toxic.

Kantara: Large Format and the Honesty of Location

The story of how Kantara was made is, in some ways, the most instructive case study in this entire generation of South Indian blockbusters — because it achieved the seemingly impossible feat of making a ₹16 crore film feel like a ₹200 crore one, and grossing ₹400–450 crore on that investment.

The cinematographer was Arvind S. Kashyap, who made a foundational decision: shoot in large format with ARRI ALEXA Mini LF and LF cameras, paired with Signature Prime lenses. “Primarily because of the colour science and dynamic range of ARRI’s large-format system,” he told ARRI in a post-release interview. “There was no other sensor which came close to the Mini LF in terms of handling the extreme high contrasts this project required. Also, since most of the film was set in low light situations, large format made most sense.”

  • 70–80 percent of Kantara‘s footage was shot live on actual location in coastal Karnataka. VFX was used only for animals and set extensions — not as a replacement for physical filmmaking. (Arvind S. Kashyap, DOP, Kantara — Hollywood Reporter India interview, 2026)
  • The film uses three distinct visual styles for three time periods: the 1840s, the 1970s, and the 1990s. Kashyap designed each era to look as though shot on film stock from that period, creating an internal visual chronology. (ARRI interview with Arvind Kashyap, December 2022)
  • Kantara‘s colour grade was completed using DaVinci Resolve Studio with an ACES colour management workflow, handling large EXR VFX shots under a tight deadline across both theatrical and streaming versions. (Colorist Remesh CP, Creative Content Australia interview, 2023)

The climactic sequences — the Bhuta Kola possession, Rishab Shetty’s transformation — were shot in spherical format, which allowed Kashyap to experiment with aspect ratio transitions between CinemaScope and flat framing, heightening the emotional intensity at precisely the moments the narrative demanded it. This was not a VFX decision. It was a lens and format decision. The technology was in service of the story.

For Kantara: Chapter 1 (2025), the same DP returned — but the scale expanded dramatically. The prequel featured more than 3,000 VFX shots, yet the team still shot 70–80 percent of footage on real locations. The budget grew from ₹16 crore to ₹125 crore. The box office grew accordingly to ₹850–900 crore, making it the highest-grossing Indian film of 2025.

Pushpa: The Polish Eye in the Indian Forest

The casting of a Polish cinematographer for a Telugu-language film about red sandalwood smuggling in the forests of Andhra Pradesh is, on the surface, improbable. In practice, it produced one of the most visually distinctive mainstream Telugu films in years.

Mirosław Kuba Brożek, a cinematographer from the Polish film industry, first came to Indian cinema’s attention through director Vikram Kumar’s 2019 film Gang Leader. Director Sukumar saw Brożek’s work and invited him for Pushpa: The Rise. The collaboration would extend across both films and five years.

For Pushpa 2: The Rule (2024, budget ₹400–500 crore), Brożek made a significant upgrade: “During Pushpa: The Rise, I wanted to use Cooke lenses, but it didn’t happen. For Pushpa: The Rule, I finally got the chance,” he told Cooke Optics after production. He selected Cooke Anamorphic and Spherical lenses, using 32mm and 50mm focal lengths as primary choices, shooting at T4 to T5.6 for anamorphic and T2.8 for spherical formats.

The anamorphic choice was strategic — not for the oval bokeh or lens flares commonly associated with the format, but to maximise sensor utilisation and achieve striking geometric compositions. Cooke’s ability to preserve highlight detail became critical in forest sequences where the contrast between deep shadow and bright canopy is extreme.

Camera movement in Pushpa 2 was extensive and varied: gimbals, trinity rigs, handheld setups, and jibs were blended to create what Brożek called “dynamism through movement.” The result — scenes that feel simultaneously grand and intimate — is one reason the film grossed ₹1,642–1,800 crore globally, making it the highest-grossing Indian film of all time.

The VFX Engine Behind the Films

The visual effects across these blockbusters represent a significant portion of the Indian VFX industry’s growth story. Understanding who made what is instructive.

Makuta VFX — founded in Hyderabad in 2010 by Adel Adili, R.C. Kamalakannan, and Pete Draper — was the primary VFX studio for Pushpa: The Rise. Their work included on-set VFX supervision, LiDAR scanning of forest locations (enabling photorealistic digital environment extensions), complex waterfall simulations, foliage extensions, and the action climax involving a large-scale forest fire. The fire simulation — blending practical flame elements with computational fluid dynamics modelling — was seamlessly integrated with Brożek’s live-action photography. Makuta had previously done landmark work on Baahubali and RRR.

Pushpa 2 used multiple studios, reflecting its expanded ambition. PhantomFX — which has an 80% acquisition stake in Tippett Studio, the Oscar-winning VFX company of Jurassic Park fame — delivered over 7,000 VFX shots across the production, including digital doubles, realistic creature animation, fluid simulations, and high-end motion tracking. 88VFX (division of 88 Pictures) also contributed to key sequences. The film’s VFX team created scenes that appeared to be shot in real locations — a Japan fight sequence, a Maldives episode, a Rameswaram boat chase — that were in fact predominantly digital constructions.

The budget proportion this represents is significant. In 2020, Bollywood films allocated approximately 5 percent of production budgets to VFX. By 2024, that figure had risen to 18 percent. South Indian cinema now accounts for 42 percent of India’s domestic VFX demand.

Technology Comparison: KGF to Toxic

Film Year Cinematographer Camera / Lenses Key VFX Studio Budget Box Office
KGF: Chapter 1 2018 Bhuvan Gowda ARRI Alexa SXT · Master Prime lenses In-house ₹80 cr ₹250 cr
KGF: Chapter 2 2022 Bhuvan Gowda ARRI Alexa · Master Prime lenses Multiple studios ₹100 cr ₹1,250 cr
Kantara 2022 Arvind S. Kashyap ARRI ALEXA Mini LF · Signature Primes DaVinci Resolve · ACES ₹16 cr ₹450 cr
Kantara: Ch. 1 2025 Arvind S. Kashyap ARRI ALEXA LF · Cooke lenses Multiple (3,000+ shots) ₹125 cr ₹900 cr
Pushpa: The Rise 2021 Mirosław Kuba Brożek ARRI system (Polish DoP) Makuta VFX (LiDAR scanning) ₹225 cr ₹380 cr
Pushpa 2: The Rule 2024 Mirosław Kuba Brożek Cooke Anamorphic + Spherical (32mm, 50mm) 88VFX · PhantomFX (7,000+ shots) ₹450 cr ₹1,700 cr+
Toxic 2026 Rajeev Ravi Physical sets over green screen DNEG (Dune: Part Two team) ₹800 cr TBD

Sources: ARRI technical interviews; Cooke Optics interviews with DPs; Wikipedia production data; Variety box office tracking; FICCI EY Entertainment Report 2024.

The Indian VFX Industry: A Quiet Revolution

Behind every frame of these blockbusters is an industry that has undergone a structural transformation most outside observers have not fully registered.

  • USD 1.00 billion — The Indian VFX market’s 2024 valuation — projected to reach USD 1.70 billion by 2033 at a CAGR of 5.70%. (IMARC Group, India VFX Market Report, 2024)
  • ₹5,400 crore — Indian VFX segment revenue in 2023 (approximately USD 647 million) — an 8% increase from ₹5,000 crore in 2022. (FICCI EY Entertainment Report, March 2024)
  • 4,000+ — VFX studios of various sizes and specialisations operating in India as of October 2024. (IBEF, “The Rise of VFX Industry in India,” April 2025)
  • 6 — Oscar-winning films in the last three years to which Indian VFX studios contributed — cementing India’s position as a global technical partner of choice. (The VFX Empire, “Future of VFX Industry in India,” 2025)

The studios driving this growth read like a who’s who of technical cinema: DNEG India, Red Chillies VFX, Makuta VFX, PhantomFX (now partially Tippett), 88VFX, Prime Focus. Each has evolved from being a cost-competitive outsourcing destination to a creative partner on flagship productions.

RedChillies.vfx — Shah Rukh Khan’s VFX studio — processed over 6,000 VFX shots in 2024 alone across projects including Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3. The studio has been pioneering AI integration in Indian VFX workflows, deploying machine learning for Jawan and Pathaan. Their first all-AI-based short film, Dasavatar, was directed by Atlee (of Jawan) and presented at a major industry event — marking AI’s formal arrival in Indian film production.

In September 2025, the Maharashtra government unveiled a ₹3,268 crore policy to boost the Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics, and Extended Reality (AVGC-XR) sector — targeting ₹50,000 crore in investments and 200,000 jobs over 25 years. The government has woken up to what the filmmakers figured out first.

The Toxic Counter-Argument: What Critics Missed

The reviews were not kind. Most mainstream critics gave Toxic one to two stars. “Godard’s famous line — all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun — was never meant to be taken this literally,” wrote the Deccan Herald reviewer. The Hindustan Times gave it one star. Outlook gave it one star. The common charges: narrative incoherence, tonal inconsistency, storytelling that substitutes spectacle for character.

Those criticisms are not without merit. But they miss something important about what Toxic represents as a technical and industrial document — and why it matters for Indian cinema’s trajectory regardless of whether its story worked.

Read the technical credits before you read the reviews.

DNEG — the BAFTA and Oscar-winning VFX house behind Dune: Part Two, Oppenheimer, and Interstellar — handled the visual effects. This is not a studio that works on films beneath a certain creative threshold. Their decision to partner on Toxic says something about how global-tier VFX companies are now viewing Indian production ambition.

J.J. Perry — who choreographed the action sequences on the John Wick franchise, recognised internationally as the benchmark for visceral, coherent action filmmaking — spent 45 days in Mumbai shooting Toxic‘s action sequences. The production used Stuntvis technology: advanced previsualization software that maps stunt sequences in a 3D digital environment before a single camera rolls, allowing safety protocols to be designed around the physics of each shot. This is how the John Wick films achieve their distinctive blend of real stunt work and minimal CGI augmentation. It is now being applied to Indian cinema.

Rajeev Ravi — a National Award-winning cinematographer whose body of work includes Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur and Ranbir Kapoor’s Sanju — designed Toxic‘s visual language. Even critics who dismissed the film repeatedly praised his work. “Despite DP Rajeev Ravi’s extravagant mounting,” wrote Outlook, by way of conceding that the visual architecture was not the problem.

Director Geetu Mohandas — whose previous film Margarita With a Straw won international awards and played at major film festivals — made a production decision that is worth examining: Toxic was shot primarily on physical sets, not green screens. A 20-acre set near Bengaluru was constructed to recreate the world of 1940s–1970s Goa. More than 1,000 crew members and 450 actors, including foreign extras, populated this physical environment. Locations were shot across Bengaluru, Mumbai, Goa, Jaipur, and Thoothukudi.

The result was a production challenge of a kind that distinguishes craft from decoration. Building a period world in physical space rather than generating it digitally requires production design, costume, props, and on-set choreography to function as a unified system. T.P. Abid’s production design was cited even by negative reviews as a strength.

The film grossed ₹137.50 crore domestic in two days. On the third day it crossed ₹200 crore globally. At a budget of ₹800 crore, Toxic has commercial challenges ahead. But its significance is not purely financial. The infrastructure assembled to make it — international VFX, Hollywood stunt choreography, previsualization technology, physical-set production design at scale — represents a capability that Indian cinema has now demonstrated it can deploy. That capability does not disappear because one film’s story did not land.

When India masters both the craft and the storytelling simultaneously — which it has done before, with Baahubali, KGF, Kantara, Pushpa 2, RRR — the technical infrastructure already exists to support it. Toxic built more of that infrastructure.

Bad reviews and good technology are not contradictions. They are a warning that story remains the most important technology of all.

The Socio-Cultural Earthquake

To understand the cultural significance of what has happened in Indian cinema since 2018, it is necessary to understand how completely the old order has been overturned.

  • ₹4,000 cr vs ₹5,200 cr — South Indian cinema’s domestic box office versus Hindi cinema’s in 2019. By 2021, the tables had turned: South Indian films generated ₹2,400 crore to Hindi cinema’s ₹800 crore — the pandemic compressing totals but shifting the ratio fundamentally. (EY-FICCI Entertainment Report; Forbes India, December 2022)
  • 40% — Hindi cinema’s share of India’s domestic box office in 2024 — down from its historic dominance. Regional industries, led by Telugu and Tamil, claimed the remaining 60%. (Journalism University / Variety India tracking, 2025)
  • $1.37 billion — India’s 2024 box office gross. The two highest-grossing films were Pushpa 2: The Rule ($162.9 million) and Kalki 2898 AD ($90 million) — both Telugu-language productions. (Ormax Media; Variety India box office report, January 2025)
  • 50% — Share of Amazon Prime Video’s 2021 audience for South Indian content that came from outside the films’ home states — driven by subtitles and dubbed versions accessible via OTT during the pandemic. (CII Report; Forbes India, 2022)
  • 84% / 72% — More than 84% of Indians now consume regional language content; over 72% of Indian audiences watch content in languages they do not natively speak, thanks to subtitles and dubbing. (YouGov survey data; TrendVisionZ Research, September 2025)

The mechanism of this shift is worth examining carefully, because it is not reducible to a single cause. Three forces operated simultaneously.

The OTT Democratisation Effect

The Covid-19 pandemic closed theatres and forced audiences onto OTT platforms. On those platforms, the algorithm does not distinguish between Kannada and Hindi. A viewer who had never previously considered watching a South Indian film discovered KGF: Chapter 1 on Amazon Prime, watched it with subtitles or dubbing, and found that the language they thought they needed was not the language that mattered. What mattered was the world the film created.

This is the “Baahubalisation” effect, named by researchers and industry analysts for the film that first demonstrated the phenomenon at scale. S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali: The Conclusion (2017) proved that an Indian film in a regional language could attract a national and international audience if the production values were high enough and the story universal enough. KGF, Kantara, Pushpa, and RRR each inherited and amplified this discovery.

Cultural Authenticity as Competitive Advantage

There is a quality in the best of these films that deserves more analytical attention than it typically receives: they are deeply, specifically local. Kantara is not a generic action film with a forest backdrop. It is a film about the Bhuta Kola ritual traditions of the Tulu people of coastal Karnataka, the specific relationship between tribal communities and the land they have protected for generations, and the spiritual grammar of a belief system that most of India outside Karnataka had never previously encountered on screen.

Pushpa is not a generic gangster film. It is a film rooted in the specific social hierarchies, labour dynamics, and masculine pride structures of the Chittoor region of Andhra Pradesh — expressed through the red sandalwood smuggling economy that actually operates in that landscape.

This specificity — paradoxically — is what created their universality. A PwC entertainment report from 2025 noted: “As consumers are moving away from starcasts to authentic storytelling rooted in regional culture, filmmakers are focusing on creating content that resonates emotionally while retaining universal appeal.” The formula, if it can be called that, is emotional truth dressed in local detail.

The Economic Flywheel

The commercial success of these films has created a reinvestment cycle that is accelerating the technical capabilities available to the next generation of filmmakers. Hombale Films — Vijay Kiragandur’s production house that bankrolled the KGF franchise and Kantara — now operates at the scale of a major studio, with the financial resources to pursue the kind of pre-production rigor that KGF required: 18 months of pre-production for a film set in the 1970s, ensuring that every matchbox and telephone was period-accurate.

The India Cine Hub — a co-production initiative — received 73 co-production applications in 2024–25, more than double the previous year. International interest in Indian productions is not simply a function of admiration. It is a function of return on investment: the “beyond Bollywood” wave has demonstrated that regional Indian cinema can generate global returns.

The RRR arc is perhaps the clearest illustration. S.S. Rajamouli’s Telugu-language epic won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, became the first Indian film to win a Golden Globe, and grossed over $125 million internationally. Rajamouli has since stated publicly: “We are no longer making films for our state. We are making films for the world.” That sentence would have been regarded as hubris five years ago. Today it reads as mission statement.

How Indian Filmmaking Has Changed: A Technical Reckoning

The shift in Indian cinema’s technical infrastructure over the past decade is both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitatively, the numbers are unambiguous. Qualitatively, what has changed is harder to measure but more important: the relationship between directors, cinematographers, and technology.

The old model was: story → locations → camera → post-production VFX (if budget allowed). The new model is: story → previsualization → camera + VFX as integrated partners → multi-format release (standard, IMAX, 4DX, D-Box, PVR ICE).

Pushpa 2‘s theatrical release formats — standard, IMAX, 4DX, D-Box, and PVR ICE simultaneously — represent a distribution sophistication that Hollywood studios developed over decades. Indian productions are now launching at that level of multi-format sophistication from the first day of release.

The international crew dimension is equally significant. Pushpa‘s Polish cinematographer, Toxic‘s Hollywood stunt choreographer and its BAFTA-winning VFX house, Kantara: Chapter 1‘s Cooke lenses (British optics company) — these represent a creative internationalisation that was not structurally present in Indian cinema fifteen years ago. The best of international filmmaking practice is being selectively imported and applied to stories that remain authentically Indian.

What has NOT changed — and what distinguishes the films that succeed from those that struggle — is the primacy of the story itself. Kantara, made on ₹16 crore, grossed ₹450 crore. It used ARRI cameras because the cinematographer understood what the story needed from a camera system, not because large-format was fashionable. Toxic, made on ₹800 crore with DNEG and JJ Perry and Rajeev Ravi, faced critical challenges. The technology was not the variable. The story was the variable.

Technology can scale ambition. Only story can justify it.

Where This Is Going

The trajectory of Indian blockbuster filmmaking in the next decade is not difficult to extrapolate — because the patterns that will define it are already visible in the films reviewed here.

  • Virtual production and LED volume stages — The technology pioneered by The Mandalorian — LED walls displaying real-time rendered environments from Unreal Engine — is now entering Indian production. Prime Focus has developed virtual production infrastructure. The transition from green screen to in-camera virtual production will transform how period and fantasy films are made, enabling on-set VFX that previously required months of post-production.
  • AI-assisted animation and de-aging — Already deployed in Hollywood productions like The Irishman, AI is being integrated into Indian VFX workflows. RedChillies.vfx has explicitly named AI as a core workflow tool. The implications for period films, where historical accuracy requires recreating faces and physical environments, are substantial.
  • Dolby Atmos and immersive audio — Now standard for flagship Indian releases. The sonic world of Ravi Basrur’s KGF score — the thunderous, almost ceremonial percussion — was designed for immersive theatrical experience. Sound design in Indian blockbusters has become as technically sophisticated as the imagery.
  • International co-productions — The logical next step. The infrastructure for bringing Hollywood stunt coordinators, European cinematographers, and global-tier VFX studios to Indian productions now exists and has been proven across multiple films. The question is not whether Indian films will be made with global partners, but how many and at what scale.
  • IMAX-native shooting — Capturing footage in IMAX’s large format for the full-frame benefit, rather than upscaling from standard formats, is the frontier. Kalki 2898 AD shot portions in IMAX format. This technical investment signals ambition about how films are imagined before they are captured.

The deeper shift is cultural, not technical. Indian audiences have demonstrated that they will support storytelling from any region, in any language, at any price point — if the film makes them feel something real. That is an audience liberation that took decades to arrive and will not be reversed.

The technical capabilities that once separated Indian filmmaking from the global frontier are narrowing. The gap that remains — in storytelling complexity, in narrative risk-taking, in the willingness to complicate protagonists and challenge audience complacency — is the gap that the next generation of filmmakers will be measured against.

Baahubali asked: can India make an epic? KGF asked: can India make a myth? Kantara asked: can India make a film that a village elder and a film-school graduate both need? Pushpa 2 asked: can India make a character so beloved that the audience will wait three years and then watch for three-and-a-half hours? Toxic, whatever its critical reception, asked: can India make a film that imports the best of global filmmaking craft and applies it to an Indian vision?

The answers have been yes, yes, yes, yes, and — with qualifications — a work in progress. That is not a bad position for an industry to be in. It means the questions being asked are now the right size.

From the ARRI Alexa SXT carried on Bhuvan Gowda’s shoulder through the darkness of the Kolar Gold Fields to DNEG’s render farms processing Toxic‘s period-Goa environments — the technology is the scaffolding. The story is what stands when the scaffolding comes down.