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January 30, 2007
Bollywood today: I do not think we can claim to be in the same league as Hollywood on exploitation
Bollywood's success is leading to Western greed, Reuters reports from Mumbai in the dispatch, "Bollywood toys with spinoffs." "For decades, Bollywood was happy just to sell filmgoers a 20-rupee (US50c) cinema ticket. Now studios, tentatively evolving from dynastic family firms to Hollywood-style companies with a taste for merchandising, are increasingly trying to market everything from movie hero action figures to mobile phone ringtones of film soundtrack snippets. Krrish, Bollywood's all-singing, all-dancing, black-caped answer to Superman, was perhaps the industry's most full-on attempt yet to cash in on merchandising..." After seeing 2006's biggest Bollywood entry, "children could nag their parents to buy them Krrish dolls, Krrish superhero mask, Krrish dartboards, Krrish Rubik's Cubes, and Krrish school stationery. It is all a contrast to a a few years ago when old-fashioned revenge melodramas played in often dilapidated cinemas... Studios and analysts say the industry is ambitiously aiming at following Hollywood with "media convergence" - the buzzword for plastering a product across a wide array of media such as television, radio, the internet, video games and mobile phones... "The Indian film industry has definitely opened up to exploring various innovative revenue streams," Siddharth Roy Kapur, marketing and communications chief of... a leading Bollywood studio, said. "However, I do not think we can claim to be in the same league as Hollywood on exploitation of our content amongst non South Asian audiences." [More stats at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at January 30, 2007 05:35 PM
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