The NYT has this interesting piece on how major studios from Hollywood have started making masala blockbusters in India.
With international revenues increasingly important to the conglomerates that own the major studios, Hollywood wants to tap into India’s market. But indigenous films captured 95 percent of Indian box office sales in 2006, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The figure is identical for domestic pictures in the United States, but just 35 percent in France, 33 percent in Japan and 12 percent in Britain, according to 2005 data published by two scholars, David Waterman and Sang-Woo Lee.
“There is no country on the planet, other than India and the United States, that approaches that level of domestic business,” Andrew Cripps, the president of Paramount Pictures International, said by telephone from Los Angeles. And so Paramount, too, is contemplating Bollywood productions.
Walt Disney has partnered with an Indian studio, Yash Raj Films, to make animated movies. Their first film, “Roadside Romeo,” scheduled for next summer, is a parable of Indian inequality, featuring a dog abandoned by rich owners in Mumbai and forced to brave its hungry streets.
In addition, Warner Brothers is developing two Bollywood projects, including one song-and-dance smorgasbord, according to Richard Fox, a Warner vice president and the head of its international division. In a telephone interview he said the studio would seek to earn a majority of its Indian sales from Bollywood productions. It plans three to six movies annually in the coming years, all with Indian talent.
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