Shah Rukh Khan and Bollywood’s Global Fortunes Advance

Mumbai :

Shah Rukh Khan has many titles. The 48-year-old Bollywood superstar is known as King Khan, King of Bollywood and Bollywood Badshah (or emperor). This summer Mr. Khan became a knight. In a glittering ceremony in Mumbai, the French foreign affairs minister, Laurent Fabius, conferred France’s highest civilian honor — the Knight of the Legion of Honor — on Mr. Khan. In the official news release, Mr. Fabius said, “The French people hail Shah Rukh Khan’s talent and generosity,” which transcend “cultural and historical differences.”

Mr. Khan’s archrival Aamir Khan (no relation) was also transcending cultural differences. On July 25, his latest film, “Dhoom 3,” an action thriller and India’s highest-grossing film ever, was released on 2,000 screens in China, a first for an Indian film and a distribution strategy more often used for Hollywood blockbusters.

“There are numerous Aamir Khan fans in China,” the film’s Chinese distributor, Ying Li of HGC Entertainment, said in an email. “His image is very positive.”

The French and Chinese are among the many converts to Bollywood’s rapidly growing following. Hindi films have long had devoted fans among the 21 million Indians living overseas, and in the 1950s and ’60s, the actor-director Raj Kapoor became a household name in Soviet Russia, while Hindi films traveled to the Middle East and Africa. But in the last decade, Bollywood’s unique cocktail of emotion, song, dance and melodrama has found takers in several new markets. According to the box office tracking company Rentrak, revenues for Indian films across 36 territories rose from $66.2 million for 69 titles in 2009 to $289 million for 170 titles in 2013.

The new fans are in countries as diverse as Turkey, Peru, Panama and Iraq. Hindi films first reached Japanese theaters in 1952, but regular releases began only last year. Aki Sugihara of the Nikkatsu Corporation, the leading distributor of Hindi films there, said the Japanese like “the fact that there is not too much dependency on CGI, like in Hollywood movies.”

The Japanese pop musician and soundtrack composer Matsumura Masahide (known as Titi Matsumura) is a fan and said the appeal lies in the films’ ardent approach. “We like Indian films full of emotional feeling with the richness of heart, which Japanese people tend to miss now,” he said by email. “Even when films describe a negative problem, the way to describe it is full of big Indian love.”

The Germans are besotted with Shah Rukh Khan. Their ardor can be traced to 2004, when a German television station programmed a prime slot for “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham” (“Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness”), featuring Mr. Khan as the estranged, adopted son of a rich industrialist. The three-hankie melodrama — the film’s tagline was “It’s all about loving your parents” — single-handedly opened up a new market. Viewers “cried, felt great pleasure, joy and release,” the film’s distributor, Stephan Holla, said by email. “We do not get this from German movies or Hollywood.”

Among those viewers was Julia Wessel, a 25-year-old student of cultural anthropology. “I was intrigued by it, but I was even more intrigued by the effect it had on my mother,” she said by email. “I cannot remember ever seeing my mother cry, not even at funerals. But there she was watching this film, and she had tears running down her face.”

Bollywood became such an obsession that Ms. Wessel dropped her studies and in 2006, started a German-language Bollywood magazine called Ishq (Urdu for love), which now has a circulation of 30,000 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Despite evangelists like Ms. Wessel, Brand Bollywood hasn’t been an easy sell overseas. Hollywood and regional productions provide stiff competition. Even big-name studios like Disney India, which produces Disney-branded films, find it tough going in other countries. Amrita Pandey, who heads marketing and distribution for the studio, cited a host of factors in an email interview: “Language barriers, high investments required to develop new markets, the definite grammar of Hindi films and cultural gaps are also barriers.”

In Britain and the United States, these barriers have proved insurmountable. They are the largest overseas territories for Bollywood, but while Hindi films do penetrate mainstream theaters, the audiences are mostly of South Asian descent. Avtar Panesar, vice president of international operations for Yash Raj Films, one of Bollywood’s largest studios, pegs the non-Indian viewership at 0.5 percent. “We have done events in theaters, carried out media campaigns,” he said by email. “But it seems that these films are being made by Indians and watched by Indians.”

The crossover Hindi film has been the holy grail for Mumbai filmmakers since the success of Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in 2000, the Oscar-winning American-Chinese-Taiwanese coproduction that drew mainstream audiences in the United States. But efforts at such cross-pollination have delivered uneven results. The Indian company Reliance Entertainment invested upward of $500 million in Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, but the hits have been limited. Initially, Hollywood studios in India stumbled with local productions. Eventually Disney found an Indian partner, UTV, and Disney India’s first film after the merger — a rom-com called“Khoobsurat” — was released in the United States on Sept. 17.

Relativity Media is hoping to alter the landscape. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, it announced a $100 million joint venture with B4U, a Bollywood entertainment company. “We don’t consider ourselves Hollywood,” Relativity’s chief executive, Ryan Kavanaugh, said by phone. “We consider ourselves a content technology company. Studios think, ‘How do we sell our stuff to them?’ We are looking at how to create content for this huge market.”

Instead of finding one film that satisfies both palates, the Relativity strategy is to tailor the same content for two markets. So with an as-yet-untitled action-comedy now in production with Zach Galifianakis, Owen Wilson and Kristen Wiig, the plan is to film it again in Bollywood. A reboot of  “The Crow” would follow a similar model, with two versions shot simultaneously — one in Hollywood and one in Bollywood with American actors in the Indian version and vice versa. “Our goal is to be at this long-term,” Mr. Kavanaugh said, “We go slowly and we take the consumer with us.”

Along with consumers, Hindi films have also evolved. They are no longer a monolithic entity defined by song and dance. Daring, more personal indie productions known as Hindie movies are also making inroads locally and globally. In the past year, “The Lunchbox,” a small-budget film starring Irrfan Khan as a widower forming a bond with a neglected Mumbai housewife, made about $10 million globally at the box office, with about 40 percent of that coming from America. Despite the absence of songs and mainstream Bollywood stars, “The Lunchbox” was among the highest-grossing Hindi films in the United States. It was distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, which perhaps helped it find viewers beyond the Indian market.

Could films like “The Lunchbox” help the Hindi film industry infiltrate the final frontier of the American mainstream? As Shah Rukh Khan put it in an email: “Our content is improving. Our technology is improving. It’s time.”

source: http://www.nytimes.com / The New York Times / Home> Movies / by Anupama Chopra / September 26th, 2014

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A version of this article appears in print on September 28, 2014, on page AR15 of the New York editionwith the headline: Bollywood Is Prancing Far Abroad. Order Reprints|Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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