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Hollywood: The Mecca of movies

I do not think that there is any person in this civilized world who does not know about Hollywood. You will find people in many countries coinciding America with Hollywood. The action movies of Hollywood have world wide popularity. One does not need to know English very well to enjoy the Hollywood action movies. The breathtaking stunts, special effects are enough to make any person (including me) glued to his/er sit for one and half hour. This is the major strength of Hollywood action movies. They are highly entertaining. However, this is also their major weakness. Majority of these action movies have one thing in common- sex and obscenity. This gives people a false idea that America is a country of free sex and American’s are crazy about sex. This is a major problem.

• Bollywood stands for the Indian film industry mainly, situated in Mumbai.
• Compared to Hollywood, more films are released per year in Bollywood. In 2003 877 feature films and 1177 short films were released in India.
• Movie tickets in India are the cheapest in the world.
• According to a report published in Nightly Business Report, PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accounting and consulting firm, predicted that Indian movie Industry will make $1.12 billion by 2006.
• Another major advantage of Bollywood is that people living in countries surrounding India, understand Hindi very well. The national language of Pakistan is Urdu, which is similar to Hindi in every way; except the script. Then there are countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, where Hindi movies are very popular.   
  

Some major features of the Bollywood movies:

• A typical Bollywood movie is of two and half hours or three hours in terms of length.

• Song and dance is one of the major features of Bollywood movies. In a typical commercial film of Bollywood, there will be five or six songs. Songs with good melody and lyrics are essential parts of the movies. There are many instances of Hindi films not doing very well but the producer making profit from the music album of the movie.   

• Kissing scenes and amorous scenes which are very common in Hollywood movies, is not shown that much in Bollywood movies. However, the trend is changing gradually. Movies like Murder, Jism, Khwahish, contain sex and kissing scenes. Khwahish has the record number of kissing scenes (17). 

• Bollywood producers and directors very often take stories from Hollywood films and use it in their movies. For example, Ek Ajnabee copied Men on fire by Denzel Washington; Holiday is based on the story of Dirty Dancing by Patrick Swayze.   

The Highest grossing films of Hollywood:

According to Wikipedia the highest grossing Hollywood films are:

1. Titanic $1,845,034,188
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King $1,118,888,979
3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone $976,475,550
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers $926,287,400
5. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace $924,317,558
6. Shrek 2 $920,665,658
7. Jurassic Park $914,691,118
8. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire $891,249,794
9. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets $876,688,482
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring $871,368,364

Bollywood block busters:

In case of Indian block busters, the first film to top the list is Sholay (Fire). Made in 1975, this movie is known to be the best film in the last fifty years. It has the highest revenue in the history of Indian cinema; 50 million dollars.

Below, is given brief descriptions of few other very successful Bollywood movies. I could not find anything about their box office income. My request to the readers is that if you can find any information about the revenue of these movies please leave the links in the comment section.

FANAA: Released in 2006, this movie has the highest income in the first week; Rs. 22.79 crore. Produced by Aditya, one of the most successful commercial film makers of India, this movie pairs up Kajol and super star Amir Khan for the first time and their chemistry worked very well on the screen.

Lagaan: If you are a cricket fan then this is a must see movie for you. It reflects the spirit of cricket. The movie is produced by Amir Khan in 2001. It even made it to the foreign film category in the Oscar. It is one of the most expensive movies produced in Bollywood.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge: If you want to know about Bollywood movies then you must have to watch this movie. Without it, your knowledge about Bollywood film will be incomplete. Why? Because, after Sholay, this is the most watched film in the history of Bollywood cinema. It went on for five hundred weeks in a Mumbai movie theatre.

Krish: Another block buster of this year. This movie is the first of its kind. This is first time an Indian movie was made based on Superhero like Superman.       

Which one is better? Quantity vs. Quality

Until now, I have talked about various features of Indian and American movies. If you watch closely, you will notice that Indian film industry exceeds Hollywood in numbers but not in quality. As I have mentioned in the major features of Bollywood movies, a good number of Indian movie producers and directors copy American movies. I live in Bangladesh and Hindi movies are very popular here. I have been watching Bollywood movies from a very early age. I love these movies; the songs, the dance, the actions everything. I have also watched English movies. What ever movies I have seen, I can say from my experience that Bollywood movie makers copy Hollywood movies mainly in two ways:

Partial copying: Either the fight scenes or the story of the movie (fully or some part of the story) is taken from an English movie. Ex: Rakshak, in this movie the last action scenes were exact copies of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Hard Target. Awara Pagal Dewana, the story of this movie is taken from The Whole Nine Yards.

Full copying: In this case, the Hindi movie is the exact reproduction of the English counterpart. For example, the movie Ek Ajnabee is an exact copy of Denzel Washington’s Man on fire.

From my point of view, Hollywood is the winner. Why? Because, there is no alternative to ingenuity, creativity, and uniqueness. Hollywood movie directors and producers are the first ones to experiment with new things. They try to create a new trend. By this, I do not mean to belittle Bollywood movie industry. The point I want to make is: if you really want to be at the top of any game then you have to continuously adopt new approaches and new strategies. In this regard, at present, Hollywood directors and producers are one step ahead of Bollywood. Bollywood may produce more movies but many of these movies are just cut and paste version of Hollywood movies. This is what really makes me sad about Bollywood movies. Bollywood movie makers should try hard to produce movies with their own stories and be bold to experiment with new things.

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