At the time, the most significant market for Indian films was the Soviet Union, gaining considerable success and occasionally leading to Indian-Soviet co-productions.
[1] In the 1950s and 1960s, the Indian film industry also expanded in China and East Africa, which, after the Soviet Union, accounted for some of the largest shares of overseas revenues.
[2] The first Indian film to have a commercial release in an overseas territory was Dharti Ke Lal (1946), directed by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and based on the Bengal famine of 1943.
[7] Mehboob Khan's Academy Award-nominated Mother India (1957) was an unprecedented success in overseas markets, including Europe,[8] Russia, the Eastern Bloc, French territories, and Latin America.
[17] The highest-grossing Indian film in the Soviet Union was Disco Dancer (1982),[n 1] written by Rahi Masoom Raza and starring actor Mithun Chakraborty.
In terms of footfalls, the only Indian films estimated to have sold 100 million tickets overseas were Awaara[18] and Disco Dancer in the Soviet Union.
[21] In China, some of the Indian films to gain commercial success there during the 1970s–1980s included Awaara, Tahir Hussain's Caravan (1971), Noorie (1979), and Disco Dancer.
By 2013, China grew to become the world's second largest film market (after the United States), paving the way for Aamir Khan's Chinese box office success, starting with Dhoom 3 (2013).
[53][54] Shah Rukh Khan also holds the record for having starred in the annual highest-grossing Hindi film in overseas markets for 15 individual years, the highest for any actor, with the latest being Pathaan (2023).
[55] The following list of films is sorted in terms of US dollars (not adjusted for inflation), the standard currency used to measure box office performance for overseas markets.