Creator-led movie promotions in India cross Rs 250 Crore in 2025: Qoruz report

Creator-led content has become one of the biggest drivers of movie promotions in India, with the industry estimated to have spent over Rs 250 crore on creator-led entertainment promotions in 2025 so far. This includes influencer marketing, meme marketing, paid UGC, and seeding spends that often appear organic on social media.

New data from Qoruz, a Creator Intelligence and Collaboration Platform, shows the scale of creator-driven movie conversations this year. In 2025, creators and meme makers together generated over 610,000 posts about movies across major social platforms, driving over 2.0 billion engagements. This highlights how movie-related creator content, including memes, reactions, fan edits, and short-form videos, has become one of the most engagement-heavy categories across social platforms.

Creator Marketing is Now the Baseline Layer for Film Promotions With over 1,500 films released in India in 2025, the data points to a high creator economy intensity for entertainment. On average, this translates to 400 creator-led posts per film, indicating that creator-led promotions have become a baseline layer even beyond big-budget releases. The most effective film buzz today is being shaped less by a handful of celebrity pages, and more by distributed creator networks that can seed formats and drive repetition at scale.

The data also highlights how entertainment-first creator ecosystems are shaping the conversation. Arts & Entertainment creators and meme pages accounted for 61.67% of the total creator-led movie posts, followed by Fashion and Beauty creators, showing how movie buzz today extends beyond film circles into lifestyle and pop culture.

One of the strongest signals in the report is the role of small and mid-sized creators. Over 51% of total posts and engagements were driven by micro pages and creators, indicating that movie marketing in 2025 is being powered by high-volume, culture-native content rather than just big celebrity collaborations or a handful of mega meme pages. This signals that the most effective film buzz is coming from distributed creator networks that scale culture at speed.

From Rs 1 Lakh to 500K Views: The New Promotion Math

The report also captures how creator-led promotions are increasingly being executed through modular spends. For example, Rs 1 lakh in creator spend can typically drive 10 to 20 meme page posts for a movie, which in turn can generate 500,000+ organic views, depending on the page size, language, and the target location the marketers want momentum from. This has made creator-led campaigns one of the fastest ways to generate film discovery at scale, especially for mid-sized and regional films.

Mumbai Leads Movie Engagement, Chennai Shows Stronger Intensity

The report identifies the top engagement locations for creator-led movie conversations in India. Mumbai leads with 26.53% of total engagements, followed by Chennai (9.13%), Delhi (8.28%), Hyderabad (7.51%), and Bengaluru (4.28%), showing how movie conversations in India have become deeply city-driven and regionally amplified. While Mumbai dominates overall volume, Chennai stands out for stronger engagement intensity per creator post, reflecting how South metros punch above their weight in engagement share.

Together, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru contribute 56% of all engagements, showing how digital movie buzz is still heavily concentrated in a few cultural hubs even as content travels nationally.

Aditya Gurwara, Co-Founder and Head of Brand Alliances at Qoruz, said: “When people ask why the spend range is so wide, it’s because ‘creator marketing’ in movies doesn’t mean one fixed thing. For one film, it could be paying ten meme pages Rs 5,000 each. For another, it could be a Rs 2 crore influencer rollout. Sometimes it’s barter collabs. Sometimes it’s paid UGC through micro creators. Sometimes it’s just pushing one trend hard and letting it run.

A lot of this also happens through seeding networks. Money doesn’t always move through clean brand invoices.

Payments pass through local distributors, PR teams, talent managers, meme page brokers. That’s why a lot of movie buzz looks organic from the outside, even when there’s real spend behind it. A meaningful share of creator spends is still invisible, routed through seeding networks and local promotions rather than official brand invoices, which means the true creator economy in entertainment is likely even larger.

The truth is, every big movie today uses some form of creator fuel. Reels trends, meme pages, fan edits, reaction videos, interview creators. It’s all part of the mix now, even if nobody officially calls it influencer marketing. That’s just how films show up on feeds today. Not as ads, but as culture.” Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, Co-Founder and CEO of Qoruz, added: “What’s surprising this year is the sheer scale of adoption. Our data shows that close to 60 to 70% of movies released in 2025 used creator-led promotions in some form. Not always loudly. Not always officially. But it was there.

What’s even more interesting is how audiences are responding to it. Whether it’s Bollywood, Kollywood, or even Malayalam cinema, we’re seeing massive engagement around these cultural narratives across platforms. Everyone wants to trend on X, drive engagement on Instagram, hit millions of views on YouTube, and become meme material. Big films like Chhaava, Coolie, Kantara: Chapter 1, and more recently Dhurandhar are clearly leading the engagement game. But what’s really changing the market is that mid-scale films like Su From So, Dragon, and Lokah are also able to generate real buzz and shares when they understand how meme pages and creators work.

For many films, creator buzz has become the new ‘opening weekend.’ If a film doesn’t trend on X, spike on Reels, and hit YouTube reactions within the first 48 hours, the conversation moves on.”