Bollywood-ization of China's Film Industry

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Bollywood-ization of China's Film Industry

by confuzzled dude Mon Mar 16, 2015 9:58 am

Hollywood accounts for 60 percent of China’s box office revenue, whereas the figure is less than 10 percent in India.

How to explain the gap? Can Chinese moviegoers really be such big fans of American blockbusters? And why do Indian film fans flock to local films?

You might wonder if you’re looking at box office receipts in 2014. Transformers, Interstellar, X-Men, and Captain America were all huge Top 10 hits in China. But in India, there wasn’t a single Hollywood film in the Top 10 list. To me, this deserves as much attention as infrastructure or politics, as India’s film market says a good deal about the future challenges for the world’s biggest brands.

To start, there’s a crucial difference between the two markets. India’s film industry is highly fragmented and tailored to local markets. Hindi-language Bollywood films account for less than half the total market. Tamil-language films account for a similar share, with other local-language dialects, such as Telagu and Kanada, making up the rest of the market.

I’m a big fan of Hindi- and Tamil-language films. But they are very different types of films. As one Indian film critic explained to me, “You could pass a Tamil-language film star in the street and never recognize them, unlike the Hindi-language Bollywood film star.” And that’s because Tamil-language films are more likely to target local audiences with local themes.

It’s a very different story in China where there are far fewer films targeting local audiences. The country’s biggest film directors instead decided to take on Hollywood directly by producing big-budget costume dramas. That might have worked during the 1990s and 2000s, but it’s a strategy that’s now struggling.

However, there are early signs of China’s ‘Bollywood-ization’ as there is a new crop of low-budget films emerging. Take Guo Jingming’s Tiny Times or Xu Zheng’s Lost in Thailand. They aren’t necessarily reviewers’ favorites, but they are big commercial hits, and most importantly they are beginning to grab market share.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bensimpfendorfer/2015/03/15/china-bollywood-india-future/

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Join date : 2011-05-08