It’s been an incredible year for one Mr. Tom Holland. Not only did he get married to the love of his life Zendaya, he also starred in two of the year’s biggest movies alongside her. Amongst all the records broken by Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, Holland now adds an unlikely distinction to his multi-feathered cap — domination of the Indian box office.

For starters, Spider-Man: Brand New Day just overtook Avatar: The Way of Water as the highest-grossing Hollywood film of all time in India, with a cumulative gross of $52.8 million after its second weekend. Its opening weekend of $31.8 million also set a new record for the biggest Hollywood opening period in the history of India’s box office.

But it doesn’t stop there, because The Odyssey, in which Holland played prince Telemachus, became director Christopher Nolan’s biggest opening weekend in the country, surpassing Oppenheimer.

Both films are still playing in theaters across India, so these numbers are likely to rise.

Tom Holland’s Connection To India

Holland’s history with India has been building for years. In 2023, he was one of the many Hollywood celebrities (including Zendaya) invited to the inauguration of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai. Chronically online readers will remember the viral mispronunciations of Holland, Zendaya and Gigi Hadid’s names that made the rounds, in addition to the referring to Nick Jonas as ‘Jiju’ or ‘brother-in-law’ in relation to his marriage to Priyanka Chopra.

In July this year, Holland returned for the Mumbai premiere of The Odyssey alongside director Nolan. This was also Nolan’s first ever Indian premiere for one of his films. "Finally being able to premiere a film here is a thrill," he said at the Mumbai press conference. “I’ve never been anywhere in the world with an appreciation of what movies can be and what they should be.”

India’s Box Office Reality — With And Without Tom Holland

India’s theatrical market is the world’s largest by admissions volume and among its most competitive by content diversity. The country’s box office is usually split between various local productions, from Bollywood blockbusters like the controversial Dhurandhar franchise to regional crossovers like Peddi.

An Ormax Media report from July 2026 says “international” language films accounted for only 8% share of the gross domestic box office in the first half of this year, which makes Holland’s feat all the more impressive. The direct implication is that both his films have crossed into territory that are usually occupied exclusively by Indian domestic blockbusters.

The domestic market has been strong across languages. Dhurandhar: The Revenge topped the first half with $132 million. India’s overall first half revenues for 2026 reached $661.66 million, the highest-grossing first half since the pandemic, surpassing the first half of 2025 by around 10 percent. If this continues, the report predicts 2026 to be the best-ever year for the Indian box office.

The occupancy breakdown tells a more zoomed out story, because Brand New Day is not a film that performed well in English in major metropolitan centres only. In fact, It reached Tier II and Tier III markets that few Hollywood releases manage to infiltrate, driven in part by the enduring brand value of the Spider-man franchise.

Variety reported the film’s Hindi dub outperformed its English original in India — 95% occupancy versus 55% — even though the English version ran only in roughly 1,000 more theaters.

What Tom Holland’s Success In India Means For Western Entertainment

For Hollywood studios watching India’s box office trajectory, the lesson from this summer must not be simply that tentpole franchise films can open big in India. That has been true for years; global box office trends for blockbuster properties like Avengers and Avatar have echoed within the country as well.

It is only in the last couple of years that Western entertainment, both in film and music, has been been waking up to the sheer capacity of the Indian market. It is one densely populated with large numbers of young and middle-aged consumers with disposable income and an invested, nostalgia-driven admiration for Western pop culture, even towards acts past their commercial prime in their original markets (Westlife and Akon are some examples).

Coldplay’s 2025 stops in India, for example, broke the record for most-attended stadium concerts in the entire 21st century. An Ernst & Young report from 2025 said the two nights in Ahmedabad alone generated an estimated ₹641 crores in estimated economic impact.

At the time of publishing, examples of artists who have visited India run the gamut of musical genres. Ed Sheeran, Louis Tomlinson, Linkin Park, Justin Bieber, Akon, The Chainsmokers, The Foo Fighters, Tyla, Calvin Harris, John Mayer, Jacob Collier, Fred Again and Travis Scott are some examples, not to mention an increasing influx of K-pop artists as well.

Partly due to a gap in India’s film-experience infrastructure, Nolan’s India premiere remains an exception to the general precedent of few Western films premiering in the country (2011’s screening of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was much ahead of its time in that regard), but this is sure to change in the coming years. A 2026 Ernst & Young report estimated that “78% of Indian consumers say they prefer spending on experiences over products, signalling a move toward experience-led consumption that is reshaping how brands build connection, loyalty and cultural relevance.”

Once the novelty of having their favorites visit wears off, however, the acts that will see the highest retention in the Indian consciousness will be those intentionally making sure to both loudly appreciate and deliberately incorporate specific aspects of Indian culture (performatively or not) to its own audiences.

Dua Lipa’s 2024 concert played this concept extremely well, delighting Indian fans by performing an already viral mashup of her hit song "Levitating" with the Bollywood track "Woh Ladki Jo" from Shah Rukh Khan’s movie Baadshah.

The pattern across both film and music is the same — in the long run, India will not be a market that rewards culture indifference, or a market that rewards treating a Mumbai stop as an afterthought on the way to the Tokyo leg of the press tour. The studios and labels that are learning this are seeing the numbers, and the ones that have not, will simply be watching from the outside.

*Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, both starring Tom Holland, continue to run in theaters worldwide. *