“In the same year that Jurassic Park grossed $6 million, Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! grossed $60 million,” (Terrell 376). In Bollywood versus Hollywood, Heather Tyrrell situates Bollywood against Hollywood in order to explain western cinema’s inability to monopolize the cinematic market in India. For starters, Bollywood actively offers popular anti colonialist sentiments because it can and it’s successful. While Hollywood has effectively taken every opportunity to assert commercial dominance in the film world, it has not yet been able to even slightly infiltrate the indian market. In fact, what makes Bollywood so successful is its public opposition to Hollywood and western cinema. Not only is Bollywood cinema politically and ideologically charged, it serves as a form of escapist media in Indian culture. This explains why serious American films do not perform as well in the Bollywood sphere as they do in Hollywood. Bollywood film is often seen strictly as a form of entertainment with a structure too culturally specific to India to replicate. This segways nicely into my next point.
The Hollywood film “Slumdog Millionaire” with it’s catchy hit Jai Ho! directed by Danny Boyle won the Academy Award for best motion picture in 2009 and grossed $377.9 million at the box office. While Slumdog Millionaire was a huge success in western cinema, its triumph fell short in India. While Indian film critics praised the motion picture, it raised several qualms within Indian culture. Some found it laced with too much reality presented on a platform where cinema was meant as a form of escapism. Some found it cliché and exaggerated arguing that there was much more to India than its slums, filth and crime. The western world saw Slumdog Millionaire as a way to stake a claim in Bollywood’s market. However, their plan backfired and the movie sparked controversy in India even prior to its release there. Visas Swarup (indian author) responds to the film: “The narrative style and the plot are interesting. But if I speak for Indians like me, there’s nothing new in it for us. It’s saturated with stereotyped images of India. The expectations that had built up [around the film] were bound to make it a letdown.” Slumdog Millionaire is just one example of the western world’s failure to saturate the Bollywood market. Hollywood cannot reproduce film strategy so culturally specific to India and Bollywood.
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1873926,00.html
