India Bollywood’s bubble bursts

The opening of a new bigname Bollywood film was once a national event across India, greeted by weeks of fanfare, long queues outside cinemas and halls packed to the rafters with audiences cheering and singing along.

But this year, with 77% of releases flopping at the box office, cinema halls have been left eerily quiet and Bollywood’s once unshakeable domination of the Indian film industry has begun to look uncertain.

“This year has been extremely poor for the Hindi film industry as far as the box office is concerned,” said Sumit Kadel, a film trade analyst in India. He said there had been only three or four hit films, while everything else had bombed – a disaster for an industry that relies on at least 10 big box office smashes a year for survival.

The blame for Bollywood’s recent failures has been attributed partly to Covid, which prompted a crisis for cinemas globally. As India’s usually committed cinema-going crowds were confined to their homes, there was a rise in the popularity of platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hotstar, which are used by a quarter of India’s 1.4 billion people.

It resulted in a diversification of tastes. Bollywood has long enjoyed the privilege of being India’s “national cinema”, due in part to the prevalence of Hindi speakers and the political weight commanded by Hindi-speaking states. India’s other film industries were relegated to being “regional”, with a reputation for lacking the spectacle and star presence of Bollywood films. But as growing audiences began to avidly consume Tamil (Kollywood), Telugu (Tollywood), Malayalam, Kannada (Sandalwood) and Marathi-language films in their homes, “this made them aware of the staleness pervading Hindi films,” said Anna MM Vetticad, a film journalist and author. Meanwhile, she added, “blinkered by their privilege, Hindi film-makers failed to notice that their traditional audience had gradually begun evolving”.

As a result, this year dozens of multimillion-dollar Bollywood films found themselves facing criticism for formulaic storylines and were shunned by audiences.

“Films are not working – it’s our fault, it’s my fault,” Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar said after yet another of his films fell flat at the box office.

Instead, the biggest hits have been films made by so-called regional cinema, mainly from south India. RRR, a Telugu epic film about two revolutionaries fighting the British Raj, broke the record for the highest opening-day earnings for any Indian film and is the third highest grossing Indian film of all time, taking about $160m worldwide.

Overall, for the first six months of the year, films from south India took in 50% of the share of box office profits.

There have been some exceptions, such as The Kashmir Files, a Hindilanguage film that centres on a fictional retelling of the 1990 exodus of Hindus from India’s Muslimmajority region of Kashmir. The film was accused of politicised historical revision and Islamophobia and was endorsed by politicians from India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) including the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

More recently, Brahmāstra, a Bollywood fantasy action film drawn from stories from Hindu mythology, has been a hit. Against the backdrop of India’s political climate, many have concerns at what they see as the reflected “Hinduisation” of Bollywood. Aakshi Magazine, a film critic and academic, said it was concerning that overtly Hindu iconography and imagery was being utilised by Bollywood to draw in audiences.

“The fact that Brahmāstra seems to be naturalising and embedding characters in this very hyper Hindu religious universe is particularly troubling,” said Magazine.

Bollywood has long been viewed with suspicion by the Hindu rightwing, who have recently attacked some of its biggest Muslim stars, including leading a boycott on Aamir Khan’s recent film Laal Singh Chaddha, accusing him of being “anti-Hindu” . With Bollywood floundering and looking for ways to win back audiences, Magazine said there was the risk that a Hindu-ised Bollywood could become the norm, undermining its long history of being seen as largely secular and religiously inclusive. “If this film, with all its excessive religiosity, is a success, I’m sure many others will follow,” she said.