By Vipin Agnihotri
It has come into the notice of The India Street that Bollywood is seeing some serious foreign interest. As a matter of fact, Hollywood biggies such as Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers are now interested in getting into the production of Bollywood movies.
The latest film ‘Saawariya’ is produced by SPE Films India, the Indian arm of Sony Pictures Entertainment. It is worth mentioning in this regard that this is the first time that one of Hollywood’s big 6 studios is co-producing a Hindi film. In my opinion, thus far Hollywood studios have had only a peripheral presence in India, sticking to the traditional business of distributing in the country.
In terms of statistic, Hollywood’s share of the Indian film entertainment pie is a mere three to four per cent. According to sources, the big money lies in producing and distributing local films and that is the path that some of the Hollywood biggies are now taking.
Generally speaking, Saawariya is a step towards the integration of two of the world’s largest film production communities and gives a tremendous opportunity for the enormous talent in India to interact with a Hollywood studio.
If experts are to be believed, Hollywood first started testing the waters in the regional language market with dubbed versions of its English hits. For example, Jurassic Park in 1994 and Titanic in 1998 contributed around 25 to 40 per cent of their gross collections in India, signifying the progress of the market. These were followed by Spiderman, Godzilla and Casino Royale, all of which reported multi-million dollar collections.
The obvious attraction for Hollywood biggies is the size of the Indian market. The revenues of Bollywood, which were at Rs 5,990 crore in 2004 is all set to touch Rs 9,680 crore this year. If you add this up with television, home video rentals and film related merchandizing things couldn’t get any better.
Taking this into account, there is hardly a surprise that Sony, Viacom- Paramount, Time-Warner, Walt Disney and Fox are sitting up and taking notice. Only Universal Studios has not yet announced any India plans.
In my opinion, Hollywood’s interest in Bollywood will help Indian filmmakers in gaining greater knowledge and understanding of the systems followed in Hollywood. Apart from Bollywood, Hollywood studios are also seeing a potential in Indian television.
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1 comments:
Its about time US studios started paying attention to the most prolific movie makers in the world
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