Bollywood is hogging all the limelight
Do you know which movie attracted the highest TRPs on television in Mumbai this year? Take a guess. Though considered the home of Bollywood, it was Marathi comedy Shubh Mangal Savdhan which grabbed the highest eyeballs. “That’s the strength of the regional language market.
Globalisation has nearly wiped the Assamese, Oriya and Tripura film industries from existence. It is only the Bengali industry which is limping along, even while fighting to survive.
Like Hollywood and Bollywood, every regional Indian language has its own market. However, the lack of support has made it a spectacle similar to a state’s decorated wagon in a Republic Day parade. Here goes Gujarat, here comes Maharashtra.
Most theatres in West Bengal are in a bad state, they cannot attract an urban audience. And the plexes, which have come up over the last few years, are not interested in showing regional Bengali films.
Swing to the South where cinema rules. In fact, south Indian cinema seems to have everything going for it, except for recognition. Around 65 per cent of the 900 odd films, made in India every year, come from the South. Nearly 7,000 out of the total 12,000 screens in India are also in South and annual export revenues of the films are in the range of an estimated Rs 250-300 crore. Still, it does not attract the limelight in the international market as the case with Bollywood.
India produces about 1000 films every year, including 60 per cent from the South – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam
The Marathi film industry, which everyone thought will die, has now risen like a phoenix. But, there is no proper distribution network in place in Maharashtra to sustain this for long,” actor-director Mahesh Manjrekar told an Assocham seminar in Delhi. The potential, highlighted Manjrekar, was there, like, a Zee Marathi channel, (which notched up the ‘6+’ rating for Shubh Mangal) is a Rs 200 crore business entity today.