A few years ago, no one would have believed that a movie asking the crucial question uppermost in Indian film fans’ minds — “Why did Kattappa kill Bahubali?” — would elicit such a huge response from cinemagoers in Beijing. The Mandarin version of Bahubali 2: The Conclusion played across 4,000 screens in China last September and was crucial in opening up Chinese markets for Indian cinema.
In May 2017, another movie, Dangal, Aamir Khan’s sassy take on wrestling siblings from the northern state of Haryan, pulled both the Indian diaspora in China and the local Chinese to cinemas. Retitled Let’s Wrestle Dad, it grossed more than 643 million yuan (about Dh361 million). China leads some other unusual markets that can now be considered new sectors for Hindi cinema, including Australia and Central Asia.
Bahubali’s producer Shobu Yarlagadda says forays into new markets have usually sought to cater to the expatriate Indians living there but — except for the GCC states — the earnings were pretty small earlier.
“However, now with even the local population warming up to some good movies coming out of India, the market is far bigger,” he says. Bahubali 2 fared well in the US market, opening in third position at the box office, above The Circle, starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, and earning $17 million (Dh62.4m) to become the highest-grossing Indian film of all time in North America.
According to analysts at KPMG, revenue from Hindi cinemas being released overseas grew from Rs9.5 billion (about Dh548 million) in 2012 to Rs10.2 billion last year. “If Aamir Khan is popular in China, in Germany, it is Shah Rukh Khan who rules the tills. A November 2017 KPMG report says countries such as Canada, Japan, Malaysia and Turkey are also opening up to Hindi cinema.”
Ajit Thakur, CEO, Trinity Pictures, the production unit of distributors Eros International, concurs that newer markets like Canada, China and Japan have improved the bottom lines of some of Hindi cinema’s biggest releases. “The success of movies like 3 Idiots, PK, Dangal and Bahubali 2 shows how big a star Aamir Khan is in the more unusual cinema markets, like Prague or Beijing, unlike say, the US, where Shah Rukh’s movies always do better,”
he says.
Interestingly, Shah Rukh Khan’s Jab Harry met Sejal, which was a disaster in India, performed better in Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia, the three countries where it enjoyed a phenomenal run. Figures released by the Film Trade News of India reveal that Jab Harry…earned Rs670 million from these markets. Even Khan’s Raees, also a big loser in India, took in over Rs900 million in markets such as China, Indonesia and Singapore.
An October 2017 report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) expects international markets to contribute significantly to Bollywood revenues going forward. The industry body estimates the segment will grow at a rate of 7 per cent on the back of an increase in the number of movies, both Hindi and vernacular ones, travelling to overseas markets. The whole industry is set to grow 11.5 per cent over five years to hit Rs193 billion by 2019.
Soma Kancherla of Great India Films, a distributor of Indian films in North America, believes that with stronger content and a more visually exciting format Indian movies are doing much better in markets such as Canada, where
even locals are connoisseurs.
The first connoisseurs
NRIs were the original consumers of Bollywood content in the overseas market, as far back as the early 90s. One of the biggest hits in the US, UK and Middle East was Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994). Often dismissed as a wedding video, it has been one of the industry’s biggest hits both in India and abroad.
“While Hindi movies were always popular with Indians living abroad, it was Yash Chopra, with his movies shot in Switzerland, who actually wooed the NRI audience,” says Kishore Lulla, Chairman of Eros International, the first Indian media and entertainment company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and a board member for the School of Film at the University of California, Los Angeles. “He gave them everything they wanted: glamour, Indian values and international locations. Yash Johar, and later his son, Karan Johar followed it up with their own movies. NRIs introduced their non-Indian friends to the joys of a Bollywood movie. The non-Indians, of course, looked at it as a novelty, as something exotic, just like a sari or Indian food. But at least, there was a growing perception that was another country, besides the US, which makes super successful movies and had a glamorous star system, much like Hollywood.”
Bollywood producer and director Karan Johar says after Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’s super success in the 90’s, many film-makers like him began actually looking for scripts that targeted NRIs. “For a while, there was this trend of movies being made while keeping the NRI audience in mind. Of course, that phase is now over, and we are back to exploring A our backyards for stories, stories I think that also appeals to the non-Indian audience abroad.”
Bollywood trade analyst Komal Nahta says that it was only with the coming of foreign film studios in India, like Fox Star Studios, that stories being told really began to change, and the focus shifted from extravagant family dramas targeting NRIs to stories about urban India, inhabiting the fluid world between a metropolis and the Tier II cities. “These are the stories that attracted a crowd beyond the NRIs,” he says, “because these narratives seemed real, about a changing, evolving country, told in a global format.”
Johar says traditional overseas markets were limited to the US, UAE, UK and Hong Kong, but that has changed in the last two years. While Ki & Ka found patrons in Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe and Gibraltar, Mary Kom fascinated viewers in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan and Bajrangi Bhaijaan found favour in Morocco, Tunisia and Poland.
The trend towards greater acceptability in unusual markets is largely driven by the change in the content that some producers and directors have brought into their cinematic oeuvres. “Certain films are on a par with a lot of Hollywood films and would appeal to an international audience,” says director and producer Deepa Mehta. “There is a newer generation of urban films that appeal to a younger and more globally aware audience.”
