Share of U-rated movies highest in Malayalam, lowest in Bhojpuri: Data

India’s censor boards licensed almost 18,000 movies between 2017 and 2025, and the rankings reveal sharp contrasts throughout movie industries. Among the key ones, Malayalam cinema emerged as probably the most “family-friendly” on this interval, with the biggest share of U-rated certificates, adopted carefully by Tamil movies.

On the opposite finish of the spectrum, Bhojpuri movies had the smallest proportion of U-rated releases. In reality, Bhojpuri was the one Indian language the place a decrease share of movies have been licensed U than in English cinema — an uncommon reversal.

These conclusions are primarily based on knowledge collated by CBFC Watch, an unbiased analysis mission devoted to exploring movie censorship actions throughout India. Film certifications fall into broadly three teams — adults solely (A), unrestricted for all ages (U), and parental steering/basic viewers (UA).

The evaluation contains all movies, brief movies, and music movies with a period of greater than 60 minutes. Given this one-hour cut-off, it’s affordable to imagine that almost all such instances are full-length function movies.

The chart beneath exhibits the share (in %) of films rated U, U/A and A inside every language within the 2017 and 2025 interval

More A-rated movies in Telugu and Kannada

When it involves A-rated content material, solely Telugu and Kannada language motion pictures crossed the ten% mark — the one two amongst Indian languages to take action. English movies licensed in India, nonetheless, topped the checklist general, with greater than 16% carrying an grownup ranking. Among Tamil and Malayalam movies, the share of A-rated titles was beneath 7%.

While the above findings concentrate on the key movie industries, together with smaller industries shifts the image a bit. Odia cinema emerges as probably the most family-friendly, with round 42% of its movies rated U. Only 1.2% of Odia movies have been rated A — the bottom share throughout all languages — adopted by Gujarati, at simply 2.3%. Though the variety of motion pictures launched in these two languages are comparatively a lot decrease as compared.

It is price noting that an Odia dub of a Tamil movie is handled as an Odia launch on this evaluation. The identical applies to different languages. Moreover, there are situations the place the identical movie, when launched in several languages, has acquired completely different rankings. In such instances, the variations have been counted as separate movies, for the reason that certification itself is the main target of this research.

Interestingly, most Indian movies are rated U/A. In each language, over 50% of movies are rated U/A.

The open supply knowledge base developed by Diagramchasing.enjoyable may be accessed right here https://cbfc.watch/

vignesh.r@thehindu.co.in