Friday
02Jan2009
Bollywood Goes 'Back To The Future'
Friday, January 2, 2009 at 1:48AM
They don't call it Bollywood for nothing. The Indian film industry releases more movies per year than Hollywood, and even though the majority of those movies never find equal audiences outside of their homeland, it is still one of the big driving forces in international pop culture.
Colin Boyd | Permalink | in Bollywood, Remakes, Sci-Fi | Print Article | Email Article | 4 Comments | Share Article
Reader Comments (4)
I kinda resent the: "majority of those movies never find equal audiences outside of their homeland".
I think they are ignore by a lot of the common audience but they have a HUGE following outside of India too. Being UK-based myself let me just backup what I say with some evidence:
http://uk.imdb.com/boxoffice/?region=uk
#7 in the top 10 UK Charts with highest per-screen average:Ghajini (2008) --
#7 the week before was Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008)
#5 the week before was Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008), again highest per-screen average
The number of prints is rather small, but given time I'm confident that this'll grow. Back on point, these re-imaginings do tend to form an entity of their own. As you say making them more culturally significant, but above that I think, the Indian films reach many places within India where Hollywood films don't & so, culturally 'accessible' too.
As for Akshay Kumar not having the crowd-pulling power?! Though agreed he's less known internationally than the lovely Aish, I'd still bank on a film with him in it over her to make money.
Her Hollywood work has been average or below in the scale of her own career. I mean I don't see anyone screaming The Last Legion or the new Pink Panther film being an all-time classic, but she has a few of them under her belt. Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Taal being my favourites.
But there's nothing to resent: How many movies do they make every year in India, and how many of those do big business in the U.K. and beyond? The highest-grossing foreign language film in history is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and it isn't even among the top 300 movies ever made in terms of international receipts.
So, while Bollywood movies do have an audience throughout the world, the concentration is much heavier for them in India than outside of India. If you look at U.S. movies, a lot of them find pretty balanced splits between their domestic grosses and what they see in other countries.
Also, you misquoted me. I said Bollywood movies never find "equal audiences outside of their homeland," and that's very true.
I don't think I misquoted you since I copied & pasted :-P .. but valid point. I guess the resent comes from my inner hope that they break through eventually, sooner rather than later.
Genuinely. I do feel the future does show scope for this. Just in the last 5 years the distribution of Indian films has spanned out into unchartered territories in Europe & Malaysia, I guess the main focus now needs to be to get the attention of the centre-stage audiences, for which making 'big' films that hold a universal appeal would be good.
I already see this back to the future movie. It is really interesting movie.