Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara – which translates as there is only one life to live – set the box office on fire last month, grossing 1.08 billion rupees in the first 10 days alone.
The film, starring superstars Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif, “superseded all expectations”, says Nandu Ahuja, the senior vice president for distribution at Eros Internationalthat bought the rights for 600m rupees. The film also reversed the tide of flops that blighted the Hindi film industry last year, causing losses of about 5bn rupees. Fewer than a quarter of the 237 films released turned a profit, according to the trade journal Box Office India. The industry’s ill-fortune continued for the first half of this year, with distractions such as the cricket World Cup and the Indian Premier League luring audiences away from cinemas. Bollywood productions worth 3.5bn rupees only managed to recoup a maximum of 2.2bn rupees in the six months to June. But last month brought a change of scene – and record profits. All six major releases – ZNMD, Delhi Belly, Buddah Hoga Tera Baap, Murder 2,Chillar Party and Singham – were hits, with cumulative box-office collections exceeding 2.1bn rupees, 80 per cent up on July last year.
“This has been a tremendous period for Bollywood, one of the best the industry has witnessed, with these continuous hits,” says Kamal Jain, the chief financial officer at Eros, which released ZNMD worldwide after it bought the rights. “This reversal of fortunes is likely to continue, with a strong line-up of movies in the pipeline.”
India’s film industry is the largest in the world in terms of ticket sales and number of movies produced each year . The country has 10,000 theatre screens. The global consultancy Ernst & Young says Bollywood and other regional language cinemas produce more than 1,000 films annually in 20 languages. About 3.3 billion movie tickets are sold every year, the highest number in any country. The film industry is a part of India’s growing media and entertainment sector, which generated US$14.54bn (Dh53.4bn) in revenue last year, a growth of 11 per cent on 2009, according to the global consultancy KPMG. India, which has the second-largest population, is also among the world’s youngest nations. More than half the population is under 25 and this aspiring age group is boosting spending on leisure and entertainment.
But in recent years, the movie business has witnessed a sharp slowdown. KPMG estimates that industry revenues declined by a fifth in the past three years to $1.85bn last year from $2.3bn in 2008. Many big-budget movies flopped last year. Kites, starring Hritik Roshan, is reported top have lost half of its total investment of 1bn rupees. Raavan, an offbeat, arty film staring the husband and wife pair of Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai was made with a budget of 900m rupees, but lost about a third of its investment. To increase the numbers of cinema goers between March and May – when the cricket World Cup and IPL was played – some multiplex owners screened live matches, which attracted packed houses. Now the industry is on a growth trajectory, analysts say, helped by a slew of factors. These include a rise in the number of multiplex screens, improving revenue from overseas, digital screens facilitating wider releases and supplementary income streams such as digital downloads, according to KPMG.
