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| Screens go dark as cinemas hit by Bollywood strike By Rhys Blakely, 5 April, 2009 |
 Instead of pulsating to the beat of bhangra dance routines, India's film studios are likely to fall silent tomorrow after Bollywood producers called an indefinite strike.The action is over a dispute about how box-office takings are split between the producers, who finance the films, and the owners of Western-style multiplex cinemas in India who are refusing to pay more to show what they say has been a string of loss-mak-ing turkeys. The dispute has threatened to delay the release of dozens of titles and could cost the 1 billion-a-year Hindi-language movie industry tens of millions in lost ticket sales, analysts say. It also emphasises how Bollywood, which for decades was fuelled by underworld money and dominated by family dynasties, is struggling to reinvent itself in the image of Hollywood to boost profits. he producers have demanded half of the revenue earned from their titles by multiplex cinemas, in line with what they said were standard terms in the West. "In most countries in the world, multiplex owners share a revenue of 50:50, so why not India?" Yash Chopra, one of the leading Indian film moguls, asked. The owners of the new multiplexes, in a country where most people still watch films in single-screen cinemas, said that they could not afford such a split unless a film did particularly well. Currently they take as much as two thirds of the takings and say that the money is required to cover the cost of investment. One of the earliest casualties of the strike could be Shortkut, a romantic comedy produced by Anil Kapoor, the Bollywood actor who played the game-show host in Slumdog Millionaire. The strike, which is the second in six months, comes at a testing time for Indian film-makers. The success of Slumdog may have kindled interest in India among overseas audiences but at home Bollywood has released a stream of ill-received flops, leading to suggestions that its audiences are tiring of the song, dance and romance formula. Shravan Shroff, the managing director of the Fame Cinema chain, said: "When the producers started giving bad films to us, the audiences ran away. So, we are saying to them in simple words: give us good films and we are ready to pay you good money." Several multiplex chains intend to show cricket matches next month from the Indian Premier League, which has been moved to South Africa because of security concerns. It is thought that the matches will draw more crowds than Bollywood films. About 3.7 billion cinema tickets are sold in India every year, according to Ernst & Young, an accountancy group, more than twice as many as in the next biggest market, the US. Most tickets are still cheap, however – costing 30 rupees (40 pence) in some single-screen theatres – and earnings are low compared with the West. The 240 multiplex cinemas in India, which cater to the middle classes and sell tickets for as much as 400 rupees, account for only a tiny portion of the screens in the country but generate about two thirds of the cinema industry's sales. Some estimates suggest that nine out of ten multiplexes, many of which are in expensive inner-city locations, are making a loss as they battle to service the debts that financed their construction and their expensive rents. Screen gems 4bn cinema tickets sold annually in India R96bn in rupees, the 1.14bn Indian domestic film revenue in 2007 R176bn the predicted 2.4bn Indian domestic film revenue for 2012 R3.84bn the 52m taken by Sholay, the largest-grossing Bollywood film of all time 100,000 the amount Kylie Minogue was paid per day for a week's work on the Bollywood movie Blue 6.50 the amount the average Bollywood film worker was paid per day in 2008 150 movies made by Bollywood's most famous actor, Amitabh Bachchan |
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