Note also the source for this piece from Yahoo news: Christian Science Monitor
Smug article.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070517/wl_csm/obolly
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Hollywood finds formula to beat Bollywood in India</b>
By Mark Sappenfield, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Thu May 17, 4:00 AM ET
In the crowded and bug-infested movie halls of rural India, something is happening that has never happened before: An American superhero is saving the world while speaking flawless Bhojpuri.
In the grand scheme of the "Spider-Man 3" massive global release, it may seem a small thing that poor villagers in central India were able to queue up the same day as audiences in Los Angeles to see the film, dubbed into a local dialect. But to Hollywood and its Indian alter ego, Bollywood, it could signal the start of a new turf war between the world's two most popular and influential film industries.
(WASPy man's burden.)
Worldwide, the film took in $230 million in its first weekend â breaking "The DaVinci Code" record by $75 million. In India, the $4.5 million opening set several records domestically as well:
⢠The best opening weekend for a foreign-language film, topping "Casino Royale" by 28 percent.
⢠The largest single day for any foreign-language film: $1.6 million on May 4.
⢠The fastest to cross the $2.4 million mark (100 million rupees): in two days.
⢠It is on a pace to move past "Titanic," which made $13 million here, as the highest-grossing foreign film ever in India.
<b>The success suggests that after years of tinkering,</b> Hollywood has at last discovered a formula for more consistent success here: flooding Indian cinemas with nearly 600 copies and dubbing versions into Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bhojpuri. The tactic of simultaneously releasing several dubbed versions on the global release date is not unique to India, but it is new here and is yielding results.
For generations, Hollywood films here have been overshadowed by India's own kitschy brand of cinema, based in Bombay (hence Bollywood). But "Spider-Man" opens the market for greater Hollywood profits in India and marks a fresh challenge to Bollywood's virtual monopoly of the movie-obsessed nation's cinema. "Obviously, the success of the dubbed versions is a very big threat," says Anil Nagrath, secretary of the Indian Motion Picture Production Association in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay). "This is the first of more to come."
(Note language: Indian film is 'kitschy'. Hollywood films are a 'fresh' challenge, Indians are movie-obsessed - forgetting to indicate most are specifically Indian-movie obsessed. The whole para makes it seem like Indians have been lying around waiting for boring US mainstream films to save us.)
Bollywood has much to lose. It is fond of calling itself the world's largest film industry â and by many measures it is. In total, Indian filmmakers generally release more than 1,000 feature-length films a year, roughly double Hollywood's output. More people around the world buy tickets to Bollywood films than to Hollywood films, according to a 2004 study by the British Film Institute.
Yet its strength is clearly within India, where its quirky mix of absurdist plots, melodramatic love, and spontaneous dance numbers dominate the box office.
(More allegations. Indians are creatively 'absurd' and 'melodramatic'. Then Christian Science Monitor tries to get its readership to think dancing is too, because in their view it is of the devil even if they can't write <i>that</i> in public.
In reality, many American movies are hyper absurd and melodramatic. For instance, anyone even watched the tripe of the Titanic? Don't. In it, a woman wanting to commit suicide privately, nevertheless runs through the length of the ship in a most dramatic fashion weeping audibly in order to throw herself off the far end. That's very plausible
arcasm That's just one film, and just one instance from Titanic which is filled with melodrama and cheesiness.)
<b>As recently as 2005, foreign films accounted for only about 5 percent of about $1 billion in theater tickets sold annually here.
But Hollywood profits in India are growing at 35 percent a year, and the US film industry is becoming more aggressive.</b>
Nadeem Khan says he hasn't been to a single Bollywood movie this year. Instead, he is here at the Saket Cineplex in south Delhi to see "Spider-Man" â one of the last people to get a ticket before it sold out.
"I like it because of the performances and the story and the action," he says, looking the part of Bollywood extra in his faded jeans and gelled hair.
It is here in the new multiplexes of urban India that Hollywood first began making inroads. More theaters created more space, and a growing, globally aware middle class thirsted for something more sophisticated.
('Indian cinema is not sophisticated'. WASPy Christian 'Science' Monitor thinks only their films are sophisticated and have what Indians are 'thirsting for'.
Most in Asia or Europe don't take Hollywood's boxoffice movies seriously nor would they say these were sophisticated.)
Yet only a few years ago, Hollywood films warranted only about 100 prints, and if there were dubbed versions, they were often released after the English-language version finished its run.
The tactic made most Indian moviegoers feel like second-class citizens and undermined what experts say is Hollywood's greatest advantage: marketing. The turning point, experts say, was last year, when some 400 prints of the James Bond film "Casino Royale" were released in India â including three versions in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu â simultaneously with the global debut. It established an opening-weekend record haul for a foreign film.
(Of course. A film about a British guy made all the difference...)
By releasing the films widely, dubbed, and on the worldwide release date, Hollywood brought the global buzz to India â not to mention product tie-ins with fast-food chains and mobile-phone ring tones, for example. "These are avenues where Bollywood is very sluggish," says Derek Bose, author of "Brand Bollywood."
Bollywood also lacks the financial wherewithal to compete with Hollywood marketing. Movie tickets in many part of India cost $1, meaning Bollywood's global revenues are about 2 percent of Hollywood's, says Mr. Bose.
"Hollywood can spend 8 percent of its normal marketing budget for a film and get the same amount of exposure as a top Hindi film," says Sanjay Ram of BusinessofCinema.com in Mumbai.
The most lavish Bollywood films rarely cost more than $10 million. "Spider-Man 3" is thought to have cost $260 million.
(I've seen 80s European films for under a $million US that put Spiderman x 3, Titanic, Troy and other garbage to shame. And Kandukondain is infinitely better than all box office hits released in the last 7 years. So that's 270 million dollars wasted on one film alone - all the reviewers are killing Spiderman 3 with snide remarks, even when they'd raved about the first two instalments. This is all the 'sophistication' mainstream US cinema can bring? Like their fast food, mass-produced music/idols, and other empty & bland 'cultural' exports, their mainstream movies are drained of any reality, meaning or originality. They're generally unsatisfying, often unhealthy and usually dumb people down.)
Now, the release of several massive Hollywood franchises this summer â "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Shrek," and "Harry Potter" â are expected to sweep away any Hindi-language competition. In what is shaping up to be an off year for Bollywood, "Spider-Man 3" has already been blamed for taking the momentum from one of the few major Hindi releases this year, "Ta Ra Rum Pum" ("Don't Worry, Be Happy").
But experts say that the new multiplexes have created space for everyone. No one expects Hollywood to trump Bollywood in India. But this summer presages a future of more choices for Indian moviegoers, and that sounds just right to Sabayasachi Banerjee, who is at the Saket multiplex to see the world's favorite wall-crawling mutant. "We like Western movies because they are different," he says. "But we still like Bollywood movies, too."
Adds friend Reshu Kandani, "We are starting to have some variety, and that's good."
⢠Mr. Sappenfield is the New Delhi correspondent for the Monitor and USA Today.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->I think India should do what Korea and France does. Keep American movie imports in the cinema coming in at a certain quantity for a given period.
There's a lot of boring old christian theology that gets rehashed in American movies too - recently 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose', 'Constantine' and what not. I can't see it appealing to any non-christos (even British non-Catholics had a problem with 'Exorcism'), but who knows what kind of subversion they have in mind.
Islami males might freak. And the underground film mafia of Indian cinema would also be very afraid of dwindling revenue for their garbage films, which means less money for funding terrorism. Those are the only useful side-effects I can think of.
If Indian cinema must compete with foreign products in its homeground, then why not show European, SE Asian and E Asian stuff? At least people'd get high-quality competition (and better plotlines, instead of bad American rehashes of superior Asian copstories like HK's Infernal Affairs, horrors like Japanese The Ring, and romances like The Lakehouse which is based on a Korean original). We get better action: instead of watching American movies choreographed by HK action-choreographers (Matrix, X-men), one can watch HK and other Asian actors perform their country's martial arts in its natural setting. It will be infinitely less fake-looking with them performing it and it will still be choreagraphed by the same HK professionals.
And instead of gushing over the Matrix which ripped off from a range of Japanese materials including a 1995 film (which already did the bullet-time), people can be exposed to the far better originals.
American - and Canadian - sci-fi series are very good though. It's where N America's strength for storytelling, filming and acting lies. They should beam more of that into India, but I realise these aren't movies but series.
And if it were merely about watching good-looking people from outside India, 90s and present-day hollywood should be skipped altogether, unless anyone here wants to argue that Jennifer Simpson or Mark Wahlberg look more than merely average...
The Taiwanese Shu Qi for instance is wonderfully lovely. And so are E European actors - who are extremely proficient in the acting department. And unlike poor Indian actresses in sickular cinema today (or American actresses in US cinema), the women aren't made to act like they have no functioning brain.
Found some images of a couple of EE actresses who I always thought were very beautiful (typically E European looking - won't see people like this in American movies). Their acting is even better than their appearance, by the way: 1 2
<b>ADDED:</b> Not related to this thread, but the following just occurred to me. The above two actors are Slavic. Slavic people of course weren't allowed into the Oryan clique until after WWII.
In WWII their countries were taken over for 'Lebensraum' (living room) for the Oryan people and their expansion. Prior to and during the Second World War, Slavic people were murdered for being 'Untermenschen' (subhumans) and there was widespread propaganda on how 'ugly' they were. The final plan was to kill them all for Oryan Lebensraum. Even during the recent Balkan Wars and its repercussions lingering today, those in Croatia brainwashed by Catholicism say the Serbians are non-Oryan Orthodox untermenschen for being Slavic.
Today, Irish, Welsh and Slavic people are all called Oryan, whereas they weren't too long ago. Maybe tomorrow, after Aishwarya Rai and Shilpa Shetty have become sufficiently famous, Bunts - whose language Tulu is the 5th 'Dravidian' tongue - will be classed as Indo-Oryans as well. And the IERacist club will explain how Tulu actually has all the hall-marks of Oryan speech.
No no, what am I saying? There was a post on IF about how someone came to the grand conclusion that Aish's looks can't be explained without some British ancestry in there somewhere. With such 'arguments', IER doesn't have to stretch itself to turn the long-endogamous S Indian Bunts into having a lot of 'Oryan' intermixture from the time of the Oryan Migration-Invasions in 1500bce - I mean 1200bce - no, I mean 1000bce - no, it's 800bce - no yesterday.
Smug article.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070517/wl_csm/obolly
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Hollywood finds formula to beat Bollywood in India</b>
By Mark Sappenfield, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Thu May 17, 4:00 AM ET
In the crowded and bug-infested movie halls of rural India, something is happening that has never happened before: An American superhero is saving the world while speaking flawless Bhojpuri.
In the grand scheme of the "Spider-Man 3" massive global release, it may seem a small thing that poor villagers in central India were able to queue up the same day as audiences in Los Angeles to see the film, dubbed into a local dialect. But to Hollywood and its Indian alter ego, Bollywood, it could signal the start of a new turf war between the world's two most popular and influential film industries.
(WASPy man's burden.)
Worldwide, the film took in $230 million in its first weekend â breaking "The DaVinci Code" record by $75 million. In India, the $4.5 million opening set several records domestically as well:
⢠The best opening weekend for a foreign-language film, topping "Casino Royale" by 28 percent.
⢠The largest single day for any foreign-language film: $1.6 million on May 4.
⢠The fastest to cross the $2.4 million mark (100 million rupees): in two days.
⢠It is on a pace to move past "Titanic," which made $13 million here, as the highest-grossing foreign film ever in India.
<b>The success suggests that after years of tinkering,</b> Hollywood has at last discovered a formula for more consistent success here: flooding Indian cinemas with nearly 600 copies and dubbing versions into Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bhojpuri. The tactic of simultaneously releasing several dubbed versions on the global release date is not unique to India, but it is new here and is yielding results.
For generations, Hollywood films here have been overshadowed by India's own kitschy brand of cinema, based in Bombay (hence Bollywood). But "Spider-Man" opens the market for greater Hollywood profits in India and marks a fresh challenge to Bollywood's virtual monopoly of the movie-obsessed nation's cinema. "Obviously, the success of the dubbed versions is a very big threat," says Anil Nagrath, secretary of the Indian Motion Picture Production Association in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay). "This is the first of more to come."
(Note language: Indian film is 'kitschy'. Hollywood films are a 'fresh' challenge, Indians are movie-obsessed - forgetting to indicate most are specifically Indian-movie obsessed. The whole para makes it seem like Indians have been lying around waiting for boring US mainstream films to save us.)
Bollywood has much to lose. It is fond of calling itself the world's largest film industry â and by many measures it is. In total, Indian filmmakers generally release more than 1,000 feature-length films a year, roughly double Hollywood's output. More people around the world buy tickets to Bollywood films than to Hollywood films, according to a 2004 study by the British Film Institute.
Yet its strength is clearly within India, where its quirky mix of absurdist plots, melodramatic love, and spontaneous dance numbers dominate the box office.
(More allegations. Indians are creatively 'absurd' and 'melodramatic'. Then Christian Science Monitor tries to get its readership to think dancing is too, because in their view it is of the devil even if they can't write <i>that</i> in public.
In reality, many American movies are hyper absurd and melodramatic. For instance, anyone even watched the tripe of the Titanic? Don't. In it, a woman wanting to commit suicide privately, nevertheless runs through the length of the ship in a most dramatic fashion weeping audibly in order to throw herself off the far end. That's very plausible
arcasm That's just one film, and just one instance from Titanic which is filled with melodrama and cheesiness.)<b>As recently as 2005, foreign films accounted for only about 5 percent of about $1 billion in theater tickets sold annually here.
But Hollywood profits in India are growing at 35 percent a year, and the US film industry is becoming more aggressive.</b>
Nadeem Khan says he hasn't been to a single Bollywood movie this year. Instead, he is here at the Saket Cineplex in south Delhi to see "Spider-Man" â one of the last people to get a ticket before it sold out.
"I like it because of the performances and the story and the action," he says, looking the part of Bollywood extra in his faded jeans and gelled hair.
It is here in the new multiplexes of urban India that Hollywood first began making inroads. More theaters created more space, and a growing, globally aware middle class thirsted for something more sophisticated.
('Indian cinema is not sophisticated'. WASPy Christian 'Science' Monitor thinks only their films are sophisticated and have what Indians are 'thirsting for'.
Most in Asia or Europe don't take Hollywood's boxoffice movies seriously nor would they say these were sophisticated.)
Yet only a few years ago, Hollywood films warranted only about 100 prints, and if there were dubbed versions, they were often released after the English-language version finished its run.
The tactic made most Indian moviegoers feel like second-class citizens and undermined what experts say is Hollywood's greatest advantage: marketing. The turning point, experts say, was last year, when some 400 prints of the James Bond film "Casino Royale" were released in India â including three versions in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu â simultaneously with the global debut. It established an opening-weekend record haul for a foreign film.
(Of course. A film about a British guy made all the difference...)
By releasing the films widely, dubbed, and on the worldwide release date, Hollywood brought the global buzz to India â not to mention product tie-ins with fast-food chains and mobile-phone ring tones, for example. "These are avenues where Bollywood is very sluggish," says Derek Bose, author of "Brand Bollywood."
Bollywood also lacks the financial wherewithal to compete with Hollywood marketing. Movie tickets in many part of India cost $1, meaning Bollywood's global revenues are about 2 percent of Hollywood's, says Mr. Bose.
"Hollywood can spend 8 percent of its normal marketing budget for a film and get the same amount of exposure as a top Hindi film," says Sanjay Ram of BusinessofCinema.com in Mumbai.
The most lavish Bollywood films rarely cost more than $10 million. "Spider-Man 3" is thought to have cost $260 million.
(I've seen 80s European films for under a $million US that put Spiderman x 3, Titanic, Troy and other garbage to shame. And Kandukondain is infinitely better than all box office hits released in the last 7 years. So that's 270 million dollars wasted on one film alone - all the reviewers are killing Spiderman 3 with snide remarks, even when they'd raved about the first two instalments. This is all the 'sophistication' mainstream US cinema can bring? Like their fast food, mass-produced music/idols, and other empty & bland 'cultural' exports, their mainstream movies are drained of any reality, meaning or originality. They're generally unsatisfying, often unhealthy and usually dumb people down.)
Now, the release of several massive Hollywood franchises this summer â "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Shrek," and "Harry Potter" â are expected to sweep away any Hindi-language competition. In what is shaping up to be an off year for Bollywood, "Spider-Man 3" has already been blamed for taking the momentum from one of the few major Hindi releases this year, "Ta Ra Rum Pum" ("Don't Worry, Be Happy").
But experts say that the new multiplexes have created space for everyone. No one expects Hollywood to trump Bollywood in India. But this summer presages a future of more choices for Indian moviegoers, and that sounds just right to Sabayasachi Banerjee, who is at the Saket multiplex to see the world's favorite wall-crawling mutant. "We like Western movies because they are different," he says. "But we still like Bollywood movies, too."
Adds friend Reshu Kandani, "We are starting to have some variety, and that's good."
⢠Mr. Sappenfield is the New Delhi correspondent for the Monitor and USA Today.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->I think India should do what Korea and France does. Keep American movie imports in the cinema coming in at a certain quantity for a given period.
There's a lot of boring old christian theology that gets rehashed in American movies too - recently 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose', 'Constantine' and what not. I can't see it appealing to any non-christos (even British non-Catholics had a problem with 'Exorcism'), but who knows what kind of subversion they have in mind.
Islami males might freak. And the underground film mafia of Indian cinema would also be very afraid of dwindling revenue for their garbage films, which means less money for funding terrorism. Those are the only useful side-effects I can think of.
If Indian cinema must compete with foreign products in its homeground, then why not show European, SE Asian and E Asian stuff? At least people'd get high-quality competition (and better plotlines, instead of bad American rehashes of superior Asian copstories like HK's Infernal Affairs, horrors like Japanese The Ring, and romances like The Lakehouse which is based on a Korean original). We get better action: instead of watching American movies choreographed by HK action-choreographers (Matrix, X-men), one can watch HK and other Asian actors perform their country's martial arts in its natural setting. It will be infinitely less fake-looking with them performing it and it will still be choreagraphed by the same HK professionals.
And instead of gushing over the Matrix which ripped off from a range of Japanese materials including a 1995 film (which already did the bullet-time), people can be exposed to the far better originals.
American - and Canadian - sci-fi series are very good though. It's where N America's strength for storytelling, filming and acting lies. They should beam more of that into India, but I realise these aren't movies but series.
And if it were merely about watching good-looking people from outside India, 90s and present-day hollywood should be skipped altogether, unless anyone here wants to argue that Jennifer Simpson or Mark Wahlberg look more than merely average...
The Taiwanese Shu Qi for instance is wonderfully lovely. And so are E European actors - who are extremely proficient in the acting department. And unlike poor Indian actresses in sickular cinema today (or American actresses in US cinema), the women aren't made to act like they have no functioning brain.
Found some images of a couple of EE actresses who I always thought were very beautiful (typically E European looking - won't see people like this in American movies). Their acting is even better than their appearance, by the way: 1 2
<b>ADDED:</b> Not related to this thread, but the following just occurred to me. The above two actors are Slavic. Slavic people of course weren't allowed into the Oryan clique until after WWII.
In WWII their countries were taken over for 'Lebensraum' (living room) for the Oryan people and their expansion. Prior to and during the Second World War, Slavic people were murdered for being 'Untermenschen' (subhumans) and there was widespread propaganda on how 'ugly' they were. The final plan was to kill them all for Oryan Lebensraum. Even during the recent Balkan Wars and its repercussions lingering today, those in Croatia brainwashed by Catholicism say the Serbians are non-Oryan Orthodox untermenschen for being Slavic.
Today, Irish, Welsh and Slavic people are all called Oryan, whereas they weren't too long ago. Maybe tomorrow, after Aishwarya Rai and Shilpa Shetty have become sufficiently famous, Bunts - whose language Tulu is the 5th 'Dravidian' tongue - will be classed as Indo-Oryans as well. And the IERacist club will explain how Tulu actually has all the hall-marks of Oryan speech.
No no, what am I saying? There was a post on IF about how someone came to the grand conclusion that Aish's looks can't be explained without some British ancestry in there somewhere. With such 'arguments', IER doesn't have to stretch itself to turn the long-endogamous S Indian Bunts into having a lot of 'Oryan' intermixture from the time of the Oryan Migration-Invasions in 1500bce - I mean 1200bce - no, I mean 1000bce - no, it's 800bce - no yesterday.