But now suddenly everyone was watching Malayalam cinema or Maharashtrian cinema and then you realise that… there are filmmakers who are telling more interesting stories,” film critic Raja Sen said. “Regional cinema was not travelling beyond its borders. Subscribers were meanwhile exposed to local and global streaming content, including southern Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada-language films that already had legions of devoted local fans. Times have been so hard that INOX and PVR, two of India´s biggest multiplex operators, announced their merger in March to “create scale”. With streaming monthly subscriptions lower or comparable to the cost of one ticket - 100-200 rupees ($1.20-$2.50) at single-screen cinemas and higher at multiplexes - price-sensitive audiences were avoiding theatres, analysts said. Some films released during the Covid shutdown went straight to these platforms, while others hit small screens just weeks after debuting in theatres. “Bollywood, after decades of storytelling… seems to be at an inflection point unlike any other disruption it has faced before,” Ghosh wrote.īollywood, like other movie industries, has been hurt by streaming´s rise, which started before the pandemic but took off when millions of Indians were forced indoors.Īround half of India´s population has access to the internet and streaming services, including international players such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ Hotstar have 96 million subscriptions, according to a government estimate. In contrast, several Telugu-language aka Tollywood movies - a south Indian competitor to Hindi-language Bollywood - have soared to the top.Įmbarrassingly, around half the box-office takings for Hindi-language films from January 2021 to August this year were dubbed southern offerings, said State Bank of India´s chief economic adviser Soumya Kanti Ghosh in a recent report.
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