Bollywood At 100

How Big Is India’s Mammoth Film Industry?

Bollywood, is the name given to India’s Mumbai based movie industry, the world’s largest film making entity. The Indian cinematic birth commenced exactly 100 years ago with the release of the black and white silent movie “Raja Harischandra” on May 3, 1913.  

"The term Bollywood is an invention of the late 20th Century, after Bombay cinema caught the imagination of the West," Nasreen Rehman, a historian of South Asian cinema, told BBC.

There are some misconceptions about India’s huge film colony -- for example, take kissing. While it is true that open mouthed kissing is largely avoided in Bollywood films even today, it was not always like that.

In 1954,  Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India then, received a petition from a group of concerned women who wanted to limit what they asses as the bad influence of films, particularly the display of  "precocious sex habits.”

"Post independence, the kiss dissappear into a miasma of prudery and false modesty and a misguided perception of what was Indian culture and tradition really is” said film critic for the Indian Express newspaper, Shubhra Gupta.

Although Bollywood stars become instant pop icons in India, the  majority of Indians do not  watch their films.

According to BBC film director, Karan Johar,  "Of the 1.2 billion population of India, movies should reach out to at least 300 million people which is the size of India’s middle class. But currently, our reach is limited to 45 million. If we figure out how to cover this gap, it will be a game changer."Which means that less than 4 percent of Indians go to the movies regularly.

Moreover, India does not really have that many cinemas for people to go to – less than 13,000, versus almost 40,000 in the U.S. (a country which has only one-fourth of India’s population).

Still, with 1,000 films produced annually (about double Hollywood’s output), Bollywood is the world’s most prolific cinema factory.

According to the DI International Business Development, a consulting unit of the Confederation of Danish Industry, Bollywood generated revenues of $3 billion in 2011 and this figure has been growing by 10 percent a year.By 2016, revenue is expected to reach $4.5 billion have almost tripled since 2004.

As ticket prices are so much lower in India than in the US., Hollywood revenue is much higher  to the tune of s $51 billion annually, according to Bollywood country.com.

In comparison, it might be easier to turn a profit in Mumbai than in Los Angeles ,the average Bollywood film costs only about $1.5 million to make, against $47.7 million for Hollywood. Marketing costs are also much lower in India.

Outside of India, Bollywood has many fans in neighboring Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, as well as countries with large Indo Pakistani communities, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, parts of East and Southern Africa and the U.S.

Bollywood is even popular in  Japan, Germany and Russia,countries  with virtually no Indian presence !  

DIBD noted that a huge salary discrepancy between Bollywood’s elite actors and actresses  the top male stars can command wages as high as $16 million per film which is comparable to the most popular western stars but Indian actresses makes no more than $1.5 million per movie,such a big gap.