Bollywood Comes to Canada and the Box Office Charts
TORONTO, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Bollywood, the world’s most prolific movie industry based in Bombay (Mumbai), India has come to Canada and in its debut is already making its way onto the box office charts.
The Indian movie industry is said to be the biggest in the world, producing as many as 800 musical, soap-opera, type films per year. It already has an audience of one of the largest populations on earth. But now “Bollywood” as it is affectionately known is gaining new audiences in the somewhat affluent East-Indian immigrant populations throughout North America and England.
Indian communities throughout the United States and Canada are no longer content to watch their native films in local “Little Indias” or in community centres and university theatres.
“We want to bring our community into the mainstream by bringing Indian entertainment to a place used by all Canadians”, says Nav Bhatia, a Toronto area car dealer by day and entertainment promoter by night.
Bhatia has negotiated deals with American movie theatre chain AMC and with Cineplex Odeon to show Indian movies in some of their theatres.
On November 5th, three Indian films began appearing on the menu at three out of four of AMC’s Toronto area multiplexes. Viewers could choose to see a family-rated Indian movie in Hindi with subtitles or see one of twenty other Hollywood blockbusters. Brenda Nolte a spokesperson for AMC says the response has been very good. “We will be doing more, as long as they have the ability to supply them.”
On December 3rd, Cineplex Oden decided to use an old theatre in Brampton, Ontario, that was relegated to showing second run films, to show only Indian movies. Susan Davison of Cineplex Odeon says the films were sold out in advance of their screenings.
The films are doing so well, they’re even competing with some of Hollywood’s biggest hits. “There’s obviously a market for these films, they’re performing very solidly,” says Paul Dergarabedian a movie analyst based in Los Angeles. Dergarabedian places two of the Indian films being shown in Toronto on his current list of the top 100 films in North America, one at number 52 and another at 62, alongside such Hollywood films as Inspector Gadget and Happy Texas.
Ethnic communities around the world have always made arrangements to watch films from their native countries in their new country of residence, but this is the first time that a Canadian immigrant community has been able to watch their films at the multiplexes where they go to watch such Hollywood successes as Shakespeare in Love and Titanic. “To have them in the chains is unprecedented”, says Brian D. Johnson, a film critic with Maclean’s magazine.
While the Indian films have only been in the theatres for a month their arrival in mainstream theatres could mean the dawn of a new era in Canadian and western cinema.
“It’s really encouraging. It would be great to see them start to bring in not just East Indian films, but new Canadians films from all different origins, for a mass audience, not just an arthouse audience” says Johnson.
While the movies may be at the multiplexes that all Canadians go to see movies, the audiences for the Indian films that came to Toronto a month ago are still exclusively South Asian. But that may change one day.
According to Johnson, Kung Foo films made by John Woo a popular Hong Kong filmmaker only acquired cache when they were brought to the Toronto film festival. “You can have mass market films, genre films that are shown in a cultural framework and acquire a certain pedigree. It doesn’t make them any different, it’s just the way you look at them.”