Facing more competition from Hollywood and the rise of streaming services, the once mighty Bollywood industry is facing its greatest crisis yet. Here’s why:
1 Changing tastes and more options Film fans in India now have access to streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime and are exposed to greater kinds of content than ever before. A growing number of viewers find Bollywood's films inadequate and are put off by formulaic entertainers, preferring movies with more substance.
2 Growing influence of Hollywood and regional cinema The dominance of Hindi cinema is slowly fading as Hollywood and films in other Indian languages attract more viewers. In 2016, Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book (pictured) and the acclaimed Marathi film Sairat out-earned most Bollywood offerings.
3 An outdated star system An over-reliance on populating a cast with well-known names over good storytelling continues to plague the industry. Moreover, the current business model, in which male stars command exorbitant prices and also take a profit of the earnings, is unsustainable for studios and producers. Leading male stars, such as Shah Rukh Khan (pictured), in Bollywood sometimes command up to 50 per cent of the film's budget; this figure is never above 20 per cent for their Hollywood counterparts.
4 Not enough screens With 8,000 screens, of which roughly 6,000 are decrepit, single-screen theatres, India only has one screen per 96,300 people. China, by comparison, has one screen per 45,000 people, while the United States has one per 7,800 people. As a result, film productions continually eat into each other's businesses, because they're usually catering to the same audience.
5 Ticket prices are too low India produces more films a year than any other film industry but, in 2015, charged average ticket prices of 150 to 250 rupees (Dh8 to Dh14) in multiplexes; the cost is lower for single-screens. By comparison, the average ticket price in the US at the same time was US$8.61 (Dh32).
6 Piracy is rampant Although digitisation of movie theatres has curbed piracy somewhat since the late 2000s, it is still extremely rampant and costs the business US$2 billion (Dh7.35bn) and several million theatre admissions a year.