Bollywood Revenue in Sharp Decline: Down 12% in 2016

[Riaz Haq]

Bollywood movie revenue suffered 12% drop in 2016 to $338 million, the sharpest decline ever, according to Reuters news agency. Meanwhile, the global movie revenue rose just 1% to a record $38.6 billion last year, according to a report by Motion Pictures Association of America.

Box office sales hit a record $11.4 billion in the United States and Canada, up 2% from 2015, thanks to blockbusters such as “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” “The Secret Life of Pets,” and “Captain America: Civil War”, according to a report in Los Angeles Times.

By contrast, the Bollywood revenue, a tiny fraction of the global film market,  has been in decline since 2014. It fell from $413 million in 2014 to $385 million in 2015 to $338 million in 2016, down 6.7% from 2014 to 2015 and then again dropping 12% from 2015 to 216.

While Bollywood business is in sharp decline, the Pakistani cinema, though small, is growing very rapidly with the explosive growth of multiplex theater screens. Pakistan's "The News Sunday" estimates that box office receipts in the country jumped 28 per cent in 2015 as compared to 2014 and this figure is only expected to grow in coming years.

Here's how Indian media and entertainment analyst Akar Patel describes Bollywood's business opportunity in Pakistan:

"In Pakistan, there is a big market for Indian movies in their multiplexes. For decades this revenue was lost to Bollywood because the movies were pirated. Under former president Pervez Musharraf, the official screening of movies was allowed, benefiting both nations. Today all Bollywood movies are shown there. Unfortunately, the current state of ties between the two countries has been allowed to deteriorate so much that we should not be surprised if Musharraf's wise decision is reversed."

It can be a win-win arrangement with Pakistani artists working with their Indian counterparts in Indian movies and increasing Bollywood revenue from the growing Pakistan market that is already the second largest market for Bollywood entertainment. However, the powerful Hindu Nationalists appear to be succeeding in thwarting this partnership.

If the anti-Pakistan rhetoric and the attacks on Pakistani artists in Mumbai continue, it is very likely that Pakistan will respond by reimposing the ban on showing of Indian films in a rapidly expanding market market for Bollywood entertainment. In addition to increasing estrangement between the two neighbors, stopping cooperation and collaboration will be a significant blow for the entertainment industries in both India and Pakistan.

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[Riaz Haq]

#Dangal released Christmas 2016. Its first week receipts were $30 m, bringing total #Bollywood revenue to $368m, down from $385m in 2015.

Here's the data on #Dangal box office as published in TOI. 2016 total about 190 crores or about $30m. #Bollywood

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/bo...

[Riaz Haq]

Box Office: 'Baahubali 2' Becomes Highest-Grossing Indian Film of All Time

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/india-box-office-baahubali-2-...

The sequel to the 2015 epic has collected $131 million worldwide, beating previous record-holder 2014's 'PK'.
Following its record opening weekend when it released worldwide on April 28, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion has become the highest-grossing Indian film of all time.

Because India does not officially report box office numbers, local reports have tracked the latest figures. The film reportedly has crossed $131 million (over 8 billion rupees) worldwide, easily beating the estimated $123 million global haul collected by previous record-holder, 2014's PK which starred top actor Aamir Khan.

With the film collecting $13.1 million in the U.S., Baahubali 2 also beat previous record-holder Dangal's $12.4 million total haul in the territory. The real-life wrestling drama also starred Aamir Khan. In India, the film has collected over $106 million, becoming the highest-grossing film in the country, beating previous record-holder Dangal which collected $83 million.

Baahubali 2 is the sequel to the 2015 epic Baahubali: The Beginning and is directed by acclaimed South Indian helmer S. S. Rajamouli. Planned as a two-part epic, both films were simultaneously filmed at an estimated budget of $40 million, making this the most expensive Indian production ever.

The films are produced by Shobu Yarlagadda's Arka Mediaworks. The sequel continues the story of warring royal cousins in an ancient mythical kingdom and again features top South Indian stars Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Tamannaah and Anushka Shetty.

In addition to its original Telugu language version, the film was released in Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi. Leading Bollywood banner Dharma Productions distributed the Hindi version of the film and posted a tweet touting the film was “the #1 blockbuster of Indian cinema.”

[Riaz Haq]

Beyond Bollywood: where India's biggest movie hits really come from

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/may/13/bollywood-ind...



The global success of SS Rajamouli’s fantasy epic sequel Baahubali 2: The Conclusion has once again brought Indian cinema to the attention of the world. Its forerunner, the $31m-budgeted Baahubali: The Beginning (2015), grossed $100m worldwide but caused little more than a ripple outside India. Within the country, it made waves because the film, made in the south Indian Telugu and Tamil languages, saw the Hindi-dubbed version alone gross more than $20m.

Baahubali 2: The Conclusion review – joyous action epic soars

The second part of India’s most expensive film ever is a jaw-dropping blockbuster that combines nimble action with genuine heart
Read more
It is a common misconception that the Hindi-language, Mumbai-based film industry – known as Bollywood – is India’s national cinema. The numbers tell a different story. India produces an astonishing 1,900 films a year on average, of which Hindi-language Bollywood accounts for about 340. The bulk of the rest comes from the Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi and Gujarati languages. Domestic box office has remained stagnant at about $1.5bn and, while Bollywood might produce more films (Tamil had 291, Telugu 275, and Kannada 204 films in 2016), it contributes just a third of the box office gross. In short, Bollywood has the visibility, but not the profits, with the under-performers far outweighing the hits.

In this context, the numbers racked up by the “regional” Baahubali 2 – budgeted at $39m, made in Telugu and Tamil, with Hindi and Malayalam dubbed versions – are astonishing by Indian standards. The film opened on 28 April and grossed $194m in 13 days, making it the highest Indian grosser of all time and putting it on track to become the first Indian film to gross $200m. It easily outperformed the $123m collected by PK (2014), starring Bollywood icon Aamir Khan.

[Riaz Haq]

#Dubai's Abraaj invests in #Pakistan #cinema operator; Plans to build 80 new screens in next 4 years. #FDI #Theaters

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/industries/banking-finance/380400-du...

Dubai-based Abraaj Group has announced it has invested in Cinepax Limited, Pakistan’s leading cinema operator.

With Abraaj’s investment, the value of which has not been disclosed, Cinepax plans to develop 80 new screens across multiple locations over the next four years and also grow other entertainment related ventures, Abraaj said in a statement.

Arif Baigmohamed and Pir Saad Ahsanuddin established Cinepax in 2006 and launched their first multiplex in 2007. Since then, the company has established itself in the market and today has 29 screens in 12 locations.

Pakistan’s entertainment industry has significant growth potential, with a low ratio of cinema screens (0.5 per million population).

Abraaj said it will support the company in establishing international standard multiplex cinemas in new and upcoming areas.

Omar Lodhi, partner for Asia at The Abraaj Group, said: “Our investment into Cinepax demonstrates our faith in the opportunity that Pakistan’s young growing population and expanding middle class represents.

"As one of the most active investors in Pakistan, with a strong on-the-ground presence, we see a long-term market opportunity in the cinema operator and video streaming business.”

Arif Baigmohamed, chairman of Cinepax, added: “We are delighted to welcome Abraaj as an investor into our business and look forward to partnering together to reach more people across the country, providing much needed entertainment options.”

The Abraaj Group has been present in Pakistan since 2004. This transaction marks Abraaj’s ninth investment into Pakistan across a number of sectors including healthcare, power distribution, renewable energy and industrials.

[Riaz Haq]

#Bollywood and the politics of #hate: The #Indian film industry has displayed remarkable bias in favor of PM #Modi and the ruling #BJP ahead of #India's general elections. @AJEnglish https://aje.io/gr8tb

In the two-hour feature called Kesari, meaning saffron - a colour associated with the ruling party and the right wing in India - Kumar plays Havildar Ishar Singh, the commander of a Sikh regiment within the British imperial army which fought to death against rebelling Pashtun tribesmen from Afghanistan. Based on the historical battle of Saragarhi in 1897, the film portrays the Sikh soldiers as brave patriots and the Muslim Pashtun as fanatic jihadis, all as the context of colonial oppression is almost completely erased.

Kumar is not the only Bollywood star to have so ardently supported Modi and the BJP. Over the past five years, the Indian film industry has grown increasingly compliant with the political agenda of the ruling party, while many of its best-known actors have come out in full support of its members. Those few who have dared speak out against the threat that Hindu nationalism poses to the cohesion of Indian society have faced severe public harassment and little support within the industry.

Making films the BJP likes 
Another recent blockbuster which served BJP's nationalism-themed electoral campaign quite well was Uri: The Surgical Strike released in mid-January this year. The film is based on events that took place in 2016, when India launched a "surgical strike" against Pakistan in response to a deadly attack on the Indian army base in Jammu and Kashmir state the same year.

The motion picture of course portrayed Modi in a positive light, as a patriotic strongman bound on pursing revenge against the enemy state (Pakistan) for harbouring anti-Indian terror groups. With its nationalistic narrative and feel-good revenge theme, it became so popular that it topped the box office with spectacular earnings of 2.4 billion rupees ($34m). Cinemas across the country reverberated with chants like "Bharat mata ki jai!" (Glory to the motherland!) during screenings.

A short exchange between a commander and a soldier in one of the scenes even coined a now widely used patriotic phrase - "How's the josh [energy/enthusiasm for defending the country]?" In the weeks following the release of the film, the prime minister, the defence minister and almost every other member of the Indian cabinet used the popular phrase in official tweets and government events to boost its image of a resolute leadership.

A month after the film was released, the public josh for revenge was re-ignited once again after a rebel group attacked an Indian military convoy killing dozens of soldiers. Staying true to his cinematic image, Modi immediately ordered another "surgical strike" against Pakistan, targeting a military camp allegedly belonging to the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) armed group. "How's the josh" filled Indian social media yet again, as Indians celebrated the valour of their prime minister who "saved" the country and its pride.

Apart from Uri, a number of other recent films have pandered to BJP's political agenda, particularly its smearing of the opposition. Both The Tashkent Files and The Accidental Prime Minister, released just ahead of the elections, portrayed the Congress party as weak and divisive and unable to lead the country in the right direction.

But Bollywood's increasingly noticeable political bias is not limited to writing scripts that propagate certain political ideologies. In January, just three months before the elections, the BJP released a photo of Modi surrounded by leading lights from the film industry including Karan Johar, Ranbir Kapoor, and Ranveer Singh, which, according to the Huffington Post, was an image-building exercise for the prime minister ahead of the vote and was widely shared by BJP-controlled social media accounts.

[Riaz Haq]

Seema Chishti
@seemay
“Bigotry is not easy to calibrate, as the PM is learning this week. Many interesting things emerge from the manner in which the BJP attempted to handle the fiasco created by its spokespersons Nupur Sharma and Naveen Jindal”
@Aakar__Patel
in
@TheIndiaCable
today.

https://twitter.com/seemay/status/1534542973450346496?s=20&t=5G...


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Aakar Patel
@Aakar__Patel
bjp is a party of bigots. indeed the bjp is bigotry. it operates under a nehruvian carapace abroad. the secular aspirations of the indian state before modi give him the cover on days like today

https://twitter.com/Aakar__Patel/status/1533475176414752769?s=20&am...

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Aakar Patel:


"The government has not bulldozed properties of Muslims for resisting rioting; it has conducted civic acts related to unauthorized construction. India is not targeting its Muslims through CAA-NRC pincer; it is only showing solidarity with non-Muslims from neighboring nations. Allowing mobs to prevent congregational prayers in designated spaces is really to ensure traffic flows smoothly.

"There can not be many who are innocent of what is going on. Certainly, there are none among the votaries of Hindutva. The problem is having democratized violence against Muslims across the country, and having been electorally rewarded for this, Modi must consider what it means for India. He has been given a taste of that this week, and as the sequence of events shows, he has not found it appealing. Trouble on this front will return unless Hindutva retreats and returns India to its normative secular state its Constitution prescribes. This is not going to happen under Modi, of course. The next best thing is to backpedal Hindutva a bit and calibrate Hindutva to a level where it pleases its constituency but doesn't offend the world. This will not be easy as we are about to find out.

[Riaz Haq]

Affected by the inherently divisive nature of religious Hindu nationalism, the Indian diaspora is increasingly polarized in its view of India and the world. This September, communal violence broke out in the U.K. between Hindus and Muslims from the subcontinent. Meanwhile, anti-Muslim parades in New Jersey exposed fault lines in the U.S. Separatist sentiments are also more palpable amongst Sikhs in the West.

https://thediplomat.com/2022/12/india-is-squandering-its-two-big-ad...

Bollywood too is beginning to suffer a crisis of credibility. For several years, Indian films were building a cult following abroad, unparalleled by most foreign cinema. Between 2015 and 2019, Indian movies more than doubled their box office revenue overseas, according to Statista. But since then, that growth has gone flat.

In recent years, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has actively promoted partisan movies in service of Hindu nationalist causes to devastating effect. Last month, things came to a head at the International Film Festival of India that was held in Goa. The head juror at the event, the renowned Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, singled out “The Kashmir Files” — a movie purported to depict communal violence against Kashmiri Hindus and promoted by the BJP — for a scathing assessment. “It felt to us like a propaganda and vulgar movie that was inappropriate for an artistic and competitive section of such a prestigious film festival,” Lapid said.

Lapid’s comments elicited an angry backlash from Hindu nationalists, who accused him of downplaying a historical atrocity. But as Lapid later pointed out, his criticism did not deal with historical facts but with the artistic quality of the film, which he said whimsically portrayed good and evil like a “cartoon for kids.”

“Doesn’t an event like this, a tragic event, deserve a serious movie?” he asked pointedly.

The growing global perception that Bollywood is being coopted for partisan political purposes by the BJP is immensely costly for Indian foreign policy. For one, it makes those movies less appealing to a global audience — especially if New Delhi hopes that Bollywood will help build India’s influence overseas. But more importantly, it risks killing Bollywood’s tradition of creative freedom in the long run. And lack of creative freedom is precisely what has ailed China’s own efforts to use its film industry for foreign influence.

Over the last couple of years, New Delhi has prided itself on a newly adopted muscularity in foreign policy rhetoric, which it hopes will make India more powerful and respected overseas. But in the absence of the hard power elements that have characterized China’s rise, India ought to be expanding its traditional soft power — not squandering it away over domestic politics. It takes far more time and effort for a nation to build up its global brand value than it does to break it all down.

[Riaz Haq]

Opinion Modi’s political party has weaponized Bollywood

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/20/modi-cinema-musl...

By Rana Ayyub


For weeks now, criticism has been building around Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington. The prime minister and his Bharatiya Janata Party have been rightly accused of stoking sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims. Missing in this discussion have been the surprising and quiet ways the BJP has managed to co-opt popular culture, and especially cinema, for its political ends.

“The Kerala Story,” a feature film released last month, is emblematic of this broader trend.

The film purports to be a dramatization of a supposedly widespread phenomenon, telling the tale of a Hindu woman who converts to Islam, only to be radicalized and eventually recruited to join the Islamic State. The trailer luridly shows a Muslim woman brainwashing her friends to shun Hinduism. It shows a Muslim priest asking men to seduce Hindu women, impregnate them, distance them from their families and later send them to fight a holy war.


The description of the trailer on YouTube by the film’s creators originally claimed that the film’s protagonist is a fictionalized composite that tells the story of some 32,000 women who have suffered the same fate. The trailer quickly went viral, with prominent Hindu nationalist activists urging their followers to watch the film to understand what is happening in their country.

The BJP campaigned very hard on the back of the film in the southern state of Karnataka, with close to 20 mass rallies and eight road shows. At one of the rallies, Modi himself emphatically endorsed viewing the film. He said it portrayed the true face of terrorism and accused the opposition of trying to block the film’s release.

The film was indeed broadly criticized for its lurid air. India’s fact-checking website Alt News demolished the claim that tens of thousands of Hindu women had been brainwashed and recruited. It pointed out that reporting in 2021 found that four Indian women verifiably ended up jailed in Afghanistan after following their husbands in joining the Islamic State in Khorasan Province.


The West Bengal state government did try to stop the film from being shown. A Supreme Court justice, while deploring that the film vilified an Indian community, affirmed that the court would protect free speech and overturned the ban. The court, however, did demand that the film’s makers add disclaimers to the effect that “there is no authentic data to back up the suggestion that the figure of conversion is 32,000 or any other established figure,” and that “the film represents a fictionalized account of the events which form the subject matter of the film.”

But the damage was done. The film grossed some $37 million worldwide, becoming the second-highest-grossing Hindi film of 2023.

“The Kerala Story” playbook is a refinement of what has come before. Last year, I wrote about “The Kashmir Files,” a film so vicious toward Muslims that I left the theater fearing for my safety. “The Kashmir Files” was a box office success, too, pulling in audiences despite covid. An interesting film industry report found that more than 60 percent of the “Kashmir Files” audience were not regular cinemagoers, and that many were drawn to it by a word-of-mouth marketing campaign with its roots in BJP messaging.

Anurag Kashyap, one of India’s most celebrated filmmakers, told me that producers are being asked to make films to government spec. “Powerful Hindu nationalist groups like the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] are meeting producers and telling them what films are to be made so it can empower the government’s own agenda,” Kashyap said.

[Riaz Haq]

Opinion Modi’s political party has weaponized Bollywood

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/20/modi-cinema-musl...

By Rana Ayyub

Worse, some filmmakers are finding their films being unceremoniously dropped by streaming platforms in the past two years. Dibakar Banerjee, another prominent director, found his film “Tees,” which tells the story of a Muslim family coping with discrimination, shelved by Netflix. Banerjee said Netflix told him it felt it was not the right time to release the film. He surmised fear of political blowback scared off the streaming giant.

Meanwhile, several other films have been announced. “Swatantra Veer Savarkar” is a biopic about the founder of the Hindutva political ideology. “Godhra” will focus on the burning of a train in Gujarat in 2002 that killed nearly 60 Hindu pilgrims — an incident that triggered three days of anti-Muslim riots that cost more than a thousand lives (occurring while Modi was chief minister of the state). A promotional poster for “Hum do Hamare Barah,” a film that tackles the contentious topic of the population explosion in India, features a Muslim man, his pregnant wife in hijab and 11 children. And a teaser for a film titled “72 Hoorain” (“72 Virgins”) promises to show “the real face of Islam,” featuring visuals of known terrorists.

All these films will probably be released before the 2024 general election. Judging from the success of “The Kerala Story,” they are likely to find an enthusiastic audience — and provide more ammunition for the BJP’s campaigning.

It’s fortunate that the world is noticing what Modi and his party do in India to stir sectarianism. It should pay attention, too, to the means by which he sways the masses to align with his intolerant vision.