In case you look at the number of screens per cinema chain end of 2009. With 1,600 screens by 2013 according to KPMG, multiplexes in India will better meet the needs of young Indian consumers of the increasingly demanding urban middle class. In this perspective, in order to support the emergence of young consumers under the age of 30, to amortize production costs and to widen the distribution networks while offering better projection comfort, companies such as that Real Images, UFO and E-CITY digitize dozens of single-screen theaters across the country every month. More than 3,000 cinemas are thus equipped to screen films in digital format. At the movies123 this is important now.
- With their very large domestic market, Indian films are also translated into other regional languages and increasingly exported to the countries where the expatriate Indian community is located, but also to target audiences that go far beyond: to the States United, in England, in Canada as well as in many countries of the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa notably the Maghreb.
Aware of the growing interest in their country, their economy and their culture, Indian producers are investing more and more resources in order to increase their market shares abroad and thus generate additional revenue through distribution. in theaters, television broadcasting and the transfer of video rights. The standardization of Bollywood films is accompanied by international standards to adapt to the tastes of target audiences in the West different montages, suppression of musical sequences, shortening of films and, as mentioned earlier, dubbing in local languages.
The peculiarities of the Indian market
For years, the market share of national cinema in India has been estimated at more than 90%. The very numerous and laborious attempts to penetrate the Indian domestic market of American studios have had, for the moment, little results despite the economic opening of the country initiated since the early 1990s. And even if they remain in memories, French successes such as the Charlots series in the 1970s, or the great American successes of the 1950s and 1960s, remain exceptions that have never been accepted.
In order to fully understand the difficulty of foreign cinema to set up in India, it is important to understand that the country is divided into 14 distribution territories. These territories are all markets which each have their own film industry which is difficult to export to other territories. Only Bollywood, better structured by its professionalism and media power, but also thanks to the Hindi language, has managed to widen its dissemination area.
In 2009, however, there were 283 foreign films certified by the Indian administrative authorities, including 194 American films and no less than 15 French films compared to four or five in 2000, which places France in second position with Hong Kong. How is it then that despite a significant number of films distributed, the market share of international cinema does not exceed 10%? Why is India the only democracy in the world to leave so little room for international cinema? One of the first explanations lies in the fragility of the film and theaters exhibition networks. Until 2000, almost all screens were offered in single-screen rooms with a capacity of more than 1,000 spectators.