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I was privileged to have been asked to do a full-page piece for the Sunday supplement of Sandhya’s Sakaal Times. The piece looks at the spate of Hollywood successes in India and explores them in two articles- the latter concentrating solely on the dubbed Hollywood market.. You can follow this link to see it as it has appeared in today’s page or you can read the slightly longer (uncut) version as it is below.

When Holly met Bolly:

Harmless toying or Hostile takeover?

With James Cameron’s Avatar released across India with more than 750 prints, and 2012 emerging as the biggest box-office hit of the year, Abhishek Bandekar explores whether the successful run of Hollywood films at the Indian marquee is just a transitory event or a potentially threatening invasion.

James ‘Titanic’ Cameron’s $300 million 3D extravaganza Avatar, released across the globe this week. Hailed as an unparalleled cinematic event, Avatar is being touted as the next proverbial step in filmmaking. Back home in India, Fox Star Studios has released it with over 750 prints, by far the widest release a Hollywood motion picture has had in India…its previews registering a cent percent sellout!  While the rest of the world is busy debating the technological significance of this film though, the industry players in India are keenly observing the changing dynamics that Avatar signals vis-à-vis Hollywood films and the Indian box-office.

Once upon a time…

Hollywood films have always enjoyed a certain patronage in India. The demographics of this audience though has changed, and in fact evolved, drastically over the past decades. In the early days, Hollywood films found its audience in the downtown cinema-halls of cities like Mumbai (Bombay, then) and Kolkata (Calcutta, then!). These were mostly your Sean Connery Bond films and its clones of action and babes in bikinis; or Westerns across the spectrum from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly to Django. The audiences for these films consisted of a curious mix of the English speaking elite and the single screen frontbencher who wouldn’t be afforded as much a mix of action and skin in Hindi films.

By the 70s, there had developed a definite viewership for English films, and certain theatres prided themselves in being exclusive to Hollywood films. The Metro chain of cinemas, as well as screens like Eros and Regal in Mumbai, released only English films. The scope of English releases moreover had widened from Bond films and Westerns to other significant titles like The Godfather and The Towering Inferno.

As the requirements of the elite and the frontbencher began to get increasingly disparate though, Hollywood films came to be represented in extremes. The decade of the 80s saw smaller single screens exhibiting low-budgeted Hollywood skin flicks. And the more prestigious theatres resorted to screening Hindi films, as their core English audience wasn’t big enough to survive solely upon. More unfortunately, the quality of English releases during this decade was just as poor as its Bollywood counterpart.

So when Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park released in 1993, not many expected it to do the kind of business it did.

The birth of a market

Spielberg’s creature-feature scared, awed and kept bringing back its audience for more thrills. The unqualified success of this film, even in smaller centers, gave birth to the ‘dubbed-Hollywood’ genre (read the supplementary piece). Still, it was not until the 1997 release, and the subsequent stupendous success, of Titanic that Hollywood really started considering India as a potential market. Titanic made a thumping business of Rs.55 crores gross, a feat unequaled until this year’s 2012 which reports indicate is well on its way to making around Rs.75 crores by the end of its run!

Titanic, with its Bollywood-ish subject of an ill-fated love affair between a rich girl and a poor boy, struck an instant chord with the Indian audiences. Significantly, it bridged the gap between the contrasting audiences of Hollywood films. Titanic offered Bollywood style romance and Hollywood style production values and special effects. Titanic was also one of the first Hollywood films to have been dubbed in regional languages like Tamil and Telugu apart from Hindi.

The Hollywood market in India kept growing at a rate of 35% over the next few years. And films like Godzilla, The Mummy and Spider-Man continued to rake in the moolah.

It was still nonetheless the action and special effects films that were doing well. Dinesh Satentoli at Cinemax Cinemas believes that since most Indians are unable to understand the English accents of Hollywood actors; action and effects-laden films are always a surer bet, more so as they provide spectacular thrills. This is why script-driven films like American Beauty or The Aviator never did that well in India.

The new millennium ushered in multiplexes and gave rise to a young urban audience that championed Hollywood movies. India is today the fourth largest market for Hollywood films. International trade experts believe that in the next 25 years, it will be the biggest in the Asian continent. Nevertheless Hollywood needs to tread its path carefully if it doesn’t wish a repeat of 2004 when the Hollywood market all but crashed in India. With hasty expansion plans against a non-transparent box-office system and a loss of nearly $900 million due to piracy, companies like Fox Studios had considered shutting shop in India altogether. Aditya Shastri, former Managing Director at Fox India, had gone on record seconding the call of FICCI to resolve unsettled tax issues and a general appeal for transparency.

The numbers game!

It is interesting to note though that while domestic films still dominate the Indian film market, the fact that Hollywood films rely almost entirely on multiplexes skews the balance in its favour. Hollywood films account for a mere 8% of the total Indian film market while the percentage of multiplexes in India to overall cinema-halls is roughly between 6-7%. Yet, multiplexes comprise for as much as 50% of the revenue share of top grossing films!

A Distribution Head at PVR, unwilling to be quoted, states that Twilight made as much as Rs.2 crores on its first weekend with a release of just 25 prints across select multiplexes. An overall increase in the number of Hollywood releases (nearly 80-100 Hollywood films have released annually in India over the past two years) has also meant a substantial growth in its market share. Vijay Singh, CEO at Fox Studios, asserts that his company has seen a phenomenal 270% growth in the last three years. This is particularly why he is buoyant about Avatar. “There is unbelievable buzz for the film”, he says. “The increase in the number of multiplexes, and the emergence of an urban audience eager to watch Hollywood films has resulted in a growth of nearly 10% in our gross revenues!”, he adds.

Kercy Daruwala, Managing Director at Sony Pictures, chimes in, “We released 2012 with 650 prints, but had to increase it to 725 to meet the demands. In its fourth week, the film is still running with 106 prints in the market!”

Back to the future

So are Hollywood films a tangible threat to Bollywood’s box-office? We might be thinking ahead of ourselves. Kambakkht Ishq, despite being panned as trash, made more money than the Indian cast Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire. The foreign studios are aware of this. “Which is why they are looking at becoming long-term players”, says the CEO of UTV, Siddharth Roy Kapur. Rupert Murdoch’s deal with Vipul Shah is a step in that direction.

But yes, the Hollywood market is growing exponentially in India. The doubling in the marketing budgets of Hollywood releases in India is testament to it. Hollywood films are now enjoying simultaneous Indian releases and in certain cases, even premieres are being organized for these films, with Bollywood celebs in attendance. Spider-Man 3 had roped in the musical band Strings to compose a song exclusively for its Indian release, while the Harry Potter films have always concentrated heavily on merchandising. An eminent Indian trade critic however, dismisses these developments; declaring instead that one need not read too much into the successes of films like 2012. “These films work purely for the thrills. Hollywood romances and serious films never do well in India”, he hints.

Daruwala perhaps sums it up best. “So long as there is a lack of good Bollywood films, Hollywood will progressively keep eating into its share!”

- Abhishek Bandekar