Every item you buy is taxed, and cinema tickets are no exception. Taxation on entertainment comes under indirect tax (a kind where a consumer doesn’t pay from his pocket but a percentage of the product’s price is automatically deducted). 

As of 2023, a total of 12% GST is levied on tickets priced below INR 100 and 18% otherwise. Multiplexes, for obvious reasons, end up paying a higher percentage, and exhibitors make little to no profit from the sale of tickets. This is the exact reason why food and beverages in multiplexes are priced exorbitantly high. It’s vital to note that food and beverages have nothing to do with the cinema industry and are taxed at 5% only.

In addition to GST, there’s an additional ‘entertainment tax’ imposed by the state, which varies from one state to another. Now that every state has a fair chance to alter the ticket prices (and ultimately alter the profits distributers make), there are two common practices governments use to preserve and encourage regional talent. While the first is making the regional films completely tax-free (entertainment tax, not GST), the second is imposing a hefty tax on dubbed films. The state of Tamil Nadu is notorious for doing both. In fact, the Tamil-speaking state went to the extent of restricting the screen count of dubbed films to 80 screens. As explained before, the amount left after deducting taxes from the ticket price is called net. Having said that, a higher entertainment tax lowers the profits exhibitors and distributors make.

Today, we live in an era of pan-Indian films with actors, technicians, & producers of different ethnicities joining hands to make a motion picture of international standards.

Having said that, imposing higher taxes on dubbed films might look like a move to preserve regional talent, it is, in long term, a bane for high-budget multilingual films.