It’s official, Hollywood is crushing Bollywood films

Two massive Hollywood releases this year, Furious 7 and Avengers: Age of Ultron have not just given Bollywood stiff competition, but have lunged ahead of the domestic film industry.

Also, despite a host of releases in Bollywood — the most recent one being Akshay Kumar’s Gabbar Is Back — it’s Avengers that continues to run strong across the country. Clearly, the industry is not niche anymore in India, it has become a serious threat to Bollywood.

While growing interest and acceptance towards English films have been cited as the reason behind Hollywood’s phenomenal growth in India, a major reason which has helped them trump regional players, believe experts, are their marketing strategies. “For Avengers: Age of Ultron, we partnered with 50 local brands which is the largest not just for a Hollywood flick but also in the entire Indian industry,” says a representative from Disney India.

The trump card for Avengers’ success, says Disney’s vice-president and head of distribution and marketing, Amrita Pandey, is “That our marketing focus was also on the Hindi audience and the big win for us is that the movie’s got great response from regional audience too.”

And it’s not just Hindi, the flick was released in four languages, including Tamil and Telugu in four different formats in 2D, 3D, 4DX and IMAX 3D.

Trade analyst Komal Nahta says that Hollywood has its strategies in place. “Hollywood has a great future here because of how well they have positioned themselves. They have focussed on what we call B and C+ centres as well. These are places such as a Hajipur in Bihar, which nor you nor me would have heard of. But theatres there are showing dubbed versions of Furious 7 and Avengers and youngsters there await the next Superman or Batman release.”

On what this means for Bollywood, Nahta says, “Hollywood is known to be a regional film industry destroyer. Bollywood has put up a strong fight till now, but the only ace up its sleeve has been song sequences, which now they are trying to do away with. The biggest change this year has been Hollywood’s focus on regional languages and that’s not good news for Bollywood.”

While brand partnerships and regional dubs go a long way, Disney this time went a step further with an innovative initiative where they roped in Varun Dhawan and Shraddha Kapoor and organised a special screening of Avengers: Age of Ultron. “We even got celebs who attended the screening to pose with a special Iron Man figurine. And this time we have also distributed Hulk and Iron Man merchandises all over India including never-before-explored markets such as Lucknow, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Indore. And it performed phenomenally well in smaller centres such as Gorakhpur and Chattisgarh,” adds a Disney representative.

While the other strategies include music videos with regional artists such as the recent Mutant Macha featuring Farhan Akthar, Vishal Dadlani and Chennai band Skrat to promote the TV premiere of X-Men Days of Future Past and exclusive celeb interviews, popular analyst, Omar Qureshi believes that there is much more to come. “They (Hollywood) are the original bombardiers of marketing. What Hollywood is doing in India is very clever. The multiplex is a hydra, a multi headed monster in terms of how much content it displays. And the ones that go to multiplexes are the educated class, who if given a choice would pick a Hollywood flick. The Hollywood big guns are already here and now with innovative strategies accumulated from years of experience in foreign markets, it’s really no surprise that they’ve found the sweet spot they need to target to succeed in the Indian market,” Qureshi says.