The term Bollywood was coined in the 1970s to refer to the powerful Hindi-language film industry, located in Mumbai, the most populous city in India . It comes from the mixture of the words Bombay and Hollywood, the film mecca of the United States, in Los Angeles (California). Bollywood movies are known for their spectacular music scenes , filled with songs from the country’s culture mixed with colorful Western pop choreography. Well, according to recent data, the Bombay film industry, with its 103 years of life, has overtaken the amount of film production in the United States . Bollywood produces more than 1,000 films annually, according to the International Indian Film Academy, twice as many as Los Angeles studios. They are followed by Nollywood, the mecca of African cinema, located in Nigeria, which annually creates about 250 films a year.
Bollywood has a huge market among a population of more than 1.3 billion people. It has more than 300 million middle-class consumers and in the next generations there will be 840 million people under 35 in India who are passionate about its tapes.
However, in terms of box office and box office revenue, Hollywood remains unbeatable. Avatar (2009), by David Cameron, was the most watched film in the history of cinema worldwide, with more than 2,400 million euros of earnings. According to data published by Statista, in 2014 American cinema grossed 10.8 billion dollars while its Indian equivalent barely generated 1.59 billion dollars , less even not only than Hollywood but also than Chinese and Japanese cinema. For example, the Indian film PK , directed by Rajkumar Hirani (2014), was the one that raised the most money at the box office in his country, 90 million euros. Indian film production companies spend between $ 250,000 and $ 10 million on each film. Each title generates more than 4,000 million movie tickets sold per year. In the United States, on the other hand, the highest collection was obtained by Transformers: The era of extinction , with 1,087.4 million dollars.
Bollywood movies have an average length of about three hours and are shown with a break in the middle of the movie. Romantic stories with high doses of drama predominate, along with action and comedies, other genres in high demand by the Indian public. But in recent years Bollywood is diversifying the themes and putting aside the characteristic musical numbers to conquer a new audience in the international arena. For now, Indian cinema has penetrated with great success in Latin American countries such as Peru.
