MUMBAI AS studio chiefs are wont to do, Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, decided to do some schmoozing during a comm...
MUMBAI AS studio chiefs are wont to do, Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, decided to do some schmoozing during a commercial break at this year’s Golden Globe Awards ceremony. The target of his table hopping, however, was not Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Cruise, to whom he merely waved as strode across the opulent ballroom at the Beverly Hilton back in January. No, he was making a beeline for Shah Rukh Khan and Karan Johar, two of Bollywood’s most influential players.Mr. Gianopulos’s gesture captures the courtship dance currently being conducted between Hollywood and its Mumbai counterpart. While the triumph of “Slumdog Millionaire,” which captured eight Oscars and has taken in nearly $250 million globally so far, has given Hindi cinema a new cachet, the Hollywood studios have been enamored of the market for a decade. But even as talent and money cross borders, the studios are finding out that negotiating the distance between Burbank and Bollywood is trickier than expected.
India is a movie-mad country. More than three billion tickets are sold a year, and in 2008 the country’s film industry registered a 13.4 percent increase over 2007. In India, in contrast to most international markets, foreign films are an afterthought, accounting for only 5 percent of the total. As a result the only way for the Hollywood studios to grab a bigger chunk of the market is to make local-language films. Since 1999 Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers, the Walt Disney Company and 20th Century Fox have all set up shop for local-language production.
The first Hollywood-produced Bollywood extravaganza appeared in November 2007, when Sony released “Saawariya” (“Beloved”), an operatic $7 million reworking of Dostevsky’s “White Nights.” The same day “Om Shanti Om,” a star-studded extravaganza that Mr. Khan both produced and starred in, was also released.
The face-off between the two movies consumed the local news media. Mr. Khan, the only film star to make Newsweek’s recent list of the 50 most powerful people in the world, pitched it as a battle between the local David and the global Goliath and vowed that he would destroy the competition. He made good on his promise: according to industry estimates “Om Shanti Om” took in more than $27 million, demolishing “Saawariya,” which made $9 million.
Disney chose what seemed a safer strategy for its debut. The studio co-produced an animated film with one of Bollywood’s most enduring production houses, Yash Raj Films, whose brand of feel-good family entertainment rivals Disney here. But that film, “Roadside Romeo,” made for an estimated $3.5 million, sold only about $3.5 million worth of tickets.
Warner Brothers fared even worse with two commercial and critical duds. A small budget prevented “Saas Bahu aur Sensex” (“Mother-in-Law, Daughter-in-Law and Sensex”) from causing too much damage to the bottom line. But “Chandni Chowk to China,” in which the A-list star Akshay Kumar returned to his action roots, opened on Jan. 16 to scathing reviews and moviegoer indifference. Estimated to have cost $11.5 million, it barely recovered half its cost at the box office.
Indian companies, of course, are equally adept at making flops — Bollywood’s hit-flop ratio stands at 1 to 9 — but the Hollywood studios’ collective faltering is seen by the industry here as symptomatic of more intricate issues.
“I think the studios have adjustment issues, cultural issues and inadequate human resources,” Mr. Johar, a leading Bollywood filmmaker, said in a telephone interview. “They understand the business, but how well do they understand the pulse of this audience?”
The Hindi film industry and its consumers have their own peculiar dynamic. Though the industry has become more corporate and organized over the last 15 years, it is still very much about relationships and family. Aditya Chopra, an owner of Yash Raj Films, produces movies starring the actor Abhishek Bachchan; 20 years ago Aditya’s father, Yash, was directing Mr. Bachchan’s father, Amitabh.
The production houses continue to function largely as one-man studios. The labyrinthine layers of studio hierarchy and the complex process of greenlighting films is not the norm.
“You can’t take eight months to approve a script after every board member in Burbank has read it,” said Sandeep Bhargava of the Indian Film Company, a leading studio. “The sensibilities are a mismatch, and to top it all they don’t have strong local teams.”
Audiences are also getting harder to please. The old-school, formulaic Hindi movie — a good-versus-evil drama with larger-than-life characters who have a habit of breaking into song and dance — is no longer a safe bet. After more than 15 years of satellite television, multiplexes and economic liberalization, Indian viewers, especially the urban, affluent, educated ones, have become more discerning. Last year many of the biggest successes here were smaller, more independent-minded films. And yet Bollywood’s star system remains firmly entrenched, with the leading actors still demanding hefty payments.
The studios entered the market when “it was very expensive and frothy,” said Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment. “It became uneconomic at the time to make and distribute movies. So we did smaller films as a place holder and waited for things to cool down.” Sony’s local-language production division is currently without a chief executive.
Bollywood may be a problematic conquest for now, but Hollywood is still in wooing mode.
Warner Brothers has a dozen projects in the pipeline, including two more with Nikhil Advani, the director of “Chandni Chowk to China.” Disney is developing four live-action movies and a second animated film with Yash Raj Films. Sony is looking to build a slate of six films a year. Fox has signed a two-picture deal with the filmmaker Vipul Shah and has four other films under production.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” said Richard Fox, international executive vice president at Warner Brothers. “You can’t pound your chest when you have success any more than you can hang your head when you have a disappointment. We don’t regret anything.”
Thriving in India will ultimately require the studios to display a little more humility than they’re accustomed to showing. “We have no pretense of marching into Mumbai and pretending we know how the business works,” Mr. Gianopulos of 20th Century Fox said in an e-mail interview.
As Mr. Fox of Warner Brothers put it: “There is professionalism, passion, work ethic and talent among the production houses in India, and in reality they don’t need us at all. We want to be there, and we will adjust our ways to be in line with theirs and not the other way around.”
The studios, however, have also learned one immutable truth about the movie marketplace in India, according to Mr. Lynton of Sony, the studio behind “Saawariya”: “You don’t go up against Shah Rukh Khan, no matter how good your product is.”
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