Actors Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif in the Tomatina scene from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.It took more than 16 tonnes of tomatoes to turn the coming-of-age film, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, into the latest international cinema hit from Bollywood. The feelgood road movie's subsequent huge success, both inside and outside India, is being taken as evidence that the country's cinema is ready for global lift-off.
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Won't Get Life Back Again) follows three young friends on a raucous trip through Spain. The film has grossed more than $3.8m internationally, the best figures for an Indian release this year. It has also led the charge in a record-breaking domestic summer at the box-office.
The tomatoes were used by the film's director, Zoya Akhtar, to recreate the chaos of the La Tomatina festival in the small Valencian town of Bunol. Such attention to detail was another sign of a growing confidence that Bollywood could eventually mount a serious challenge to Hollywood for world cinema takings.
London-based Kishore Lulla, executive chairman of the film company Eros International, believes that thanks to India's economic boom, its film business will grow exponentially during the coming decade. "Once that happens, marriage between Hollywood and Bollywood will take place," he said in a recent interview. "Bollywood will be of a size that will matter to the world."
Eros, which purchased and marketed Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, has seen its share price rise by more than 10% in the past month alone. Established by Lulla's father in Mumbai in 1977, the company's initial focus was on distributing Bollywood films abroad. Things began to change after Lulla moved to London and took over control a decade later. Today Eros has an annual turnover of 75 films as a producer, co-producer or buyer, and made a net profit last year of $55m on revenues of $164m.
"Eros began in a very small way, but today we're India's biggest vertically integrated company," said Kamal Jain, the chief financial officer in Mumbai. "We have the largest film library with 1,100 films; we dub films into 27 languages and distribute them in 50 countries; and we have a presence in every segment of the business, from production to satellite TV to new media."
India produces around 1,100 films a year in several languages, with Bollywood a major centre for Hindi film production. Management consultancy KPMG sees tremendous potential for growth for the media and entertainment industry during the next five years, from the current $17bn annually to an estimated $29bn by 2015. Bollywood moguls such as Lulla appear confident that $100bn is possible in 10 years.
Their optimism is based on demography. More than 350 million Indians are now ranked as middle class, most of them young with much more money to spend than their parents had. There is also a diaspora of 50 million South Asians with estimated assets of $1 trillion and a passion for cinema.
Bollywood is changing as India surges ahead. "The film business became more professional during the last decade once the government made bank finance available," said Jehil Thakkar from KPMG . "Professionalism still remains a challenge, but companies such as Eros have brought in a new dynamism."
The old drawbacks in Indian creative industries have also begun to recede. Producers are no longer dependent upon shady financiers, many of them from the criminal underworld. Professionally managed film companies have brought in American-style studio practices.
Though the number of cinema screens is still very low for a country of India's size, multiplexes in glittering new malls charge high ticket prices and are increasingly attracting a well-heeled audience. And diversification has taken away the earlier life-and-death dependence on box-office hits. "Even before a film gets released it brings in 60% of its income," said Jain. "Slicing and dicing is the name of the game. We pre-sell the music, the satellite TV rights, the radio rights, new media such as mobile telephone ringtones – which is seeing enormous growth – inflight entertainment rights, and so on. To top it all, our huge library accounts for 20% of our revenue, providing considerable financial stability."
But even if Bollywood films are better made and better marketed today, they still sing an old tune. As Lulla said, "all Indian films are love stories – we Indians are very emotional people. Like Hollywood in the 30s, it's escapism cinema."
Zoya Akhtar believes that the huge impact of satellite TV is changing audience tastes in India, but the content of Bollywood films limits their appeal internationally. "In India, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara made more money than Harry Potter, which is crazy," she said. "But for a non-South Asian audience, I would make the film differently, I would change the idiom."
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