The Show Must Go On

With Mumbai still mourning its recent terror attacks, Bollywood faces a balancing act of showing solidarity with the residents of India’s entertainment heartland – while gently nudging locals back into movie theaters to boost an industry already hurt by the global economic downturn.

The biggest stars in the world’s biggest film industry quickly condemned the shootings in what one Indian TV station dubbed the “Star War on Terror.”

Then they got back to work – making and promoting movies.

Heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan, known as “King Khan” for his long string of box office successes, said that he wasn’t sure whether he should promote his upcoming release.

“I didn’t feel like saying ‘Go watch a film’ when people had died,” the actor said in a recent interview. But, he added, he also felt he had something to offer in tough times.

“I can’t tell people it will get you out of your sadness, but I can assure you that the two hours and 20 minutes is going to be great fun,” he said.

Part of his reaction, though, probably resulted from economics.

Bollywood already was facing tough times before the attacks, bogged down by global economic woes – and the attacks only threatened to make the situation worse.

Harsha Vardhan, vice president for marketing at INOX Leisure Ltd., which runs two theaters in Mumbai, said it was too early to know the long-term impact of the attacks.

Mumbai movie theaters have reported disappointing attendance in recent days – though many here argue that’s because of a dearth of blockbusters – and it’s still not clear how much is because of the attacks.

Fame India Ltd. recorded an occupancy of 30 percent at its eight multiplexes in Mumbai the week following the attack, said Chief Operating Officer Rishi Negi. But he blamed that on the shortage of big-name movies.

Bollywood produces more than 200 Hindi-language films every year. The entire Indian movie industry – of which Bollywood is the biggest player – earned revenues of $2 billion in 2007, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers India, about a fifth of Hollywood’s revenues.

The last quarter of 2008 had already seen a 25 percent to 30 percent drop in box office revenues from the previous quarter, said Taran Adarsh, editor of the Bollywood trade publication Trade Guide.

“The producers aren’t announcing fresh projects any more … Even the studios have adopted a wait-and-see stance,” Adarsh said in his column on the Web site Bollywood Hungama.

Now, many here worry the attacks may make an already tough economic situation worse.

On a Tuesday evening, only a smattering of people – three or four at a time – were lining up for tickets in the lobby of Metro Cinema, a 70-year-old art deco theater originally built for the Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. and now run by India’s Adlabs Films Ltd. Some of the gunmen fired at crowds standing across from the Metro during the attacks.

Ticket holders were frisked by security guards and walked through a metal detector – already a fixture at Indian cinemas before the attacks.

But movie-goers said they weren’t too worried about security. In many ways this is a city accustomed to terror, whether the July 2006 train bombings that killed 187 people or the serial blasts of 1993.

Executive Payal Shah, 25, went to the movies two days after the attacks ended. The theater, she said, was more than half empty.
“It all depends on luck. If it’s (an attack) going to happen, it could happen right now, right here also,” said Shah, who bought a ticket for the Hindi film Maharathi.

In a confidence boost for the industry, major Hollywood studios say they remain committed to their investments in India – and announced several deals after the attacks.

“We are definitely in here for the long haul,” Twentieth Century Fox International Vice President for Asia Pacific Sunder Kimatrai said.
The Walt Disney Co., which has partnered with Yash Raj Films to make computer-animated movies, recently announced another Bollywood studio, UTV Motion Pictures, will become the exclusive distributor for Disney movies in India. And Warner Bros. said it will work with India’s People Tree Films on three movies.