India

BRICS as Cinema Journey: India

For the Indian film industry, 2023 was a particularly successful year. The total box office came to nearly $1.5 billion. This is not only 15% more than in 2022, but also more than in pre-pandemic 2019, when it was $1.3 billion. That said, skeptics cautiously note that attendance in 2019 was still higher, and the record-breaking modern figures are linked to rising ticket prices. In 2019, over 1 billion tickets were sold; in 2023, the number was 943 million. Worth adding: although India is a very active cinema-going nation, film runtimes there are traditionally longer than in the West, typically around 2.5 hours, which automatically limits the number of screenings.

The Highest-Grossing Film

Finding a Common Language

This is worth pausing on. India is a very specific market, because the country has no single language spoken by the entire population. The states that make up the country have 22 official languages alone. That is not a lot for a population of 1.5 billion, but it is still not very convenient for business. The most widely spoken language is Hindi, and Bollywood in Mumbai produces films in Hindi. But even such a super-studio, known worldwide in part for its output, cannot supply the market with content due to language limitations. Other studios therefore take on this task, and audiences receive films they can understand.

But that is not entirely accurate. It is enough to cite two recent high-profile examples. One of the loudest (in every sense) Indian films of 2022 was RRR. It was the most expensive project in Indian film history, with a budget of around $50 million. Its title song won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and with total grosses of $150 million, the film holds third place on the list of the highest-grossing Indian films of all time.

And RRR was filmed in Telugu. The director is S.S. Rajamouli. His name is well known in connection with his previous triumph, the Baahubali duology — powerful fantasy blockbusters, with the second film (whose events both preceded and continued the first, making it simultaneously a prequel and a sequel) grossing over $250 million worldwide. It is the highest-grossing Telugu-language film in history and, incidentally, the highest-grossing film in the history of Indian cinema. For comparison, it grossed one and a half times more than RRR.

But what is remarkable is precisely how that result was achieved. The film was shot simultaneously in Telugu and Tamil, with the two versions differing in running time. The difference between the two languages can be gauged from the fact that the hero's son is called Sivudu in Telugu and simply Shiva in Tamil. The elder brother Baahubali is Ballaladeva in Telugu and Palvalteevan in Tamil. After production wrapped, Baahubali 2 was also dubbed into Hindi and Malayalam. This made it possible to reach a far larger audience than is typical in India. In Russia, Baahubali: The Beginning was released only in dubbed form and grossed 5 million rubles. Director S.S. Rajamouli is greatly encouraged by his successes and has publicly spoken about the time having come for him to make a grand screen adaptation of the Mahabharata. By his own calculations, he would need a year simply to familiarize himself with all available versions of the ancient text, and the result should amount to around ten films, each three hours long. This could be India's answer to Avatar, much as Baahubali was considered an alternative to the Avengers. And then Tollywood from Hyderabad would definitively outshine Bollywood. And there is still Kollywood in Chennai, where films are made in Tamil. Plus there is Mollywood, Sandalwood, and Ollywood. In recent times, however, businesspeople have been considering shooting in Hinglish — the local English dialect, which is also recognized as an official language of the country. The question remains whether such a choice would carry an awkward colonial image, and it is not entirely clear how favorably the Indian diaspora abroad would receive films from home that no longer feature their native tongue.

Stars Only

The most successful films in Indian cinema are typically representatives of the masala genre. This is, in fact, a unique genre blend that naturally includes musical numbers. Jawan, which we already mentioned as the record-holder of 2023, belongs to exactly this kind of cinema. Masala demands that performers master vocals and choreography, be versatile across all genres simultaneously, and also possess beauty and charisma. As a result, the star system in India operates far more intensively than in Hollywood. The lead star of Jawan, Shah Rukh Khan, plays both father and son in the film. Over more than 30 years in Bollywood, he has played over 100 roles and earned the nickname "King Khan."

Among other contemporary superstars, Ranbir Kapoor — grandson of Raj Kapoor — deserves mention. He is 41, in peak form, and his films gross enormous sums every year. Last year his film Animal earned nearly $80 million, making it the second-highest-grossing release of 2023 (and, incidentally, the highest-grossing project of Ranbir Kapoor's long career), astonishing audiences with a runtime of 201 minutes — extraordinary even by Indian standards. The year also proved very successful for Sunny Deol, who by the age of 67 likewise has around a hundred roles to his name. In 2023 he released Gadar 2, a sequel to his own 2021 hit. The film earned $75 million in domestic release and nearly $90 million including overseas grosses, against a budget of $7.5 million.

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