The debate on whether homegrown Bollywood production houses and independent studios can compete with Hollywood studios successfully keeps surfacing from time to time. But it took a new turn at the Screen Big Picture on Saturday when a panel of distinguished people from the field ? Reliance Big Pictures CEO Sanjeev Lamba, Rose Movies head Shrishti Arya, Balaji Motion Pictures president Swati Shetty, UTV Motion Pictures CEO Siddharth Roy Kapur, Motion Pictures Association India MD Uday Singh ?discussed this topic keenly.
Lamba kickstarted the debate by saying that the homegrown studios do have a chance of competing with Hollywood studios. ?The reason is that the comparative advantages that Hollywood enjoys around the rest of the world, are not necessarily available in India. We are the only country in the world where Hollywood makes 5-7% of the box-office income for their products. In almost every other country, be it England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Mexico, the Hollywood share is over 40%. The Indian consumer is a fiercely domestic consumer,? said Lamba.
Roy Kapur, too agreed with the observation. ?Hollywood has realised that they are up against a glass ceiling because Indians want to watch homegrown content. They?ve realised that Hollywood studios need local support to make local content and grow in India. One way of going about it is doing what Disney has done with UTV. Join hands with a company that is already developing content locally and has a successful track record,? said Roy Kapur.
The involvement of Hollywood in India isn?t new. It has been dominating Indian television for nearly two decades now, said Lamba, citing the examples of Star, Sony, Colors, ESPN, Cartoon Network and others.
Singh, however, maintained that the television business too took time to figure out. ?We dubbed serials in local languages initially, but that didn?t work. We learnt along the way that we need to have content that will be locally relevant.? Singh also pointed out that despite the Hollywood studios coming to India, one must bear in mind, that the Indian studios like Yash Raj Films, Excel Entertainment and Vinod Chopra Films have not stopped making the movies they want to produce. ?This is a great time to collaborate and it is a win-win situation for both parties. It?s not a zero-sum game. If these two big industries get together, it will be fantastic for the overall progress of storytelling across the world,? added Singh.
The entry of Hollywood studios in the Indian market has it benefits too. This has made India studios follow the international system. ?Everybody?s job profile is very clearly demarcated in an international studio, but we?re still a little myopic in the Indian market,? said Arya.
Shetty believes that Hollywood studios have also helped open up little pockets for experimentation. ?Today, Anurag Kashyap is going all the way to Cannes or some festival. Some studio can actually make it possible for Kashyap to co-direct a movie with Tim Burton someday. It could be an Indian story made with two different cinematic sensibilities. And that is something that Hollywood studios could bring to India. At the end of the day, it?s not really their money India is looking for, but their value,? added Shetty.
The growth of homegrown studios has also made sure that Indian films find a wider audience. ?So far, we have been able to take them to the South Asian diaspora. Now we want to leverage the synergy to expand to a wider audience,? says Roy Kapur. Lamba cites examples of Kites which was the first film to be released in Latin America, and 3 Idiots, which got 900 screens in China. ?It is just the desire to take your film as widely out as possible. If you?re going to sit here and do your age-old broker business, you?re going to get a certain result. If you?re going to make the effort of actually going out and building offices and bringing in people who understand the international scale, why can?t an Indian company compete on an equal level?? asks Lamba.