More number of Hollywood films waiting to be shot in India

Requests from foreign crews for shooting films shot up from 10 in 2009-10 to 28 in 2010-11.

Ethan Hunt (played by Tom Cruise) cruises in his BMW i8 in bylanes of Mumbai in his forthcoming flick Mission Impossible 4:Ghost Protocol. Last weekend, the agent was not on a mission to kill, but to reach out to a rapidly-growing audience in an emerging economy.

At last count, 22 films including big-ticket Hollywood productions like the James Bond , Christopher Nolan’ Dark Night Rises (the next Batman movie) , Ang Lee’s 3D fantasy film Life of Pi, Singularity and John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel have been given permission to shoot here.

 

“A lot of the decisions to shoot in India are based on scripts, but several production houses prefer shooting in India because it is emerging as a significant player in the global economic as well as entertainment industry,” said Uday Singh, managing director, Motion Pictures Association, the umbrella body for six Hollywood studios in India

The number of requests from foreign crews for shooting films in India shot up from 10 in 2009-10 to 28 in 2010-11, said a information and broadcasting ministry official, who is yet to collate data for the current financial year, with dozen proposals are pending with the government.

Last, few movies which were based out of here were - Oscar winning Danie Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Julia Roberts- starrer Eat Pray Love and The Mighty Heart based on life of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, kidnapped in Karachi.

According to industry officials , the market size of Hollywood in India is about Rs 850-900 crore, which contributes 10-12 per cent of the overall box-office revenue.

In an recent interview to Business Standard, Andrew Cripps President, Paramount Pictures, 60 per cent of revenues come from outside of the US, which is one of the key reasons why huge amount of attention is being paid to what happens in the international markets.

Its not just the day and date release (simultaneously releasing world-wide) or increase in number of prints anymore. To cash in on the growing market, studios are releasing movies few weeks before the film debuts in North America. In this year itself, three movies were released here first -Sony Pictures’s Adventures of Tintin and Paramount Pictures’ Transformers III: Dark of the moon and Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol.

“Our research shows that in 2010, 75 foreign films were released in India and their collections grew 30 percent over the previous year,” said a multiplex official.

A few years ago, emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, China were not amongst the top 10. Today, China has become a huge market for foreign movies although there are certain restrictions on distribution. In China, Transformers 2 collected $65 million at the box office.

This also reflected in the increasing number of Hollywood movies being shot in these countries like China and Russia. In 2006, Mission Impossible 3 which was shot extensively in China, had its global premiere in Shanghai. Even the fourth installment, has been filmed in Russia, India and UAE.

“We compare this market to Russia , China, Brazil few years ago. We have seen those markets expand rapidly in a short span. Now, Russia is the sixth biggest territory we have internationally,” Cripps added.

While everybody is gung-ho about the the sudden increase of Hollywood prints increased in India, what has not been taken into account is that it is only the big banner Hollywood flicks that get a wide release in India. All other fare, even if it has an Oscar tag like Kings Speech and Black Swan would be restricted to around 70-100 prints.

But clearly the country’s demographic profile, increasing consumption and rising aspirations make India a market ripe for western entertainment fare.