Indian Cinemas Hit By Bollywood Strike

Published by djmick on April 3rd, 2009

bollywood

Instead of pulsating to the beat of bhangra dance routines, India’s film studios are likely to fall silent tomorrow after Bollywood producers called an indefinite strike.

The action is over a dispute about how box-office takings are split between the producers, who finance the films, and the owners of Western-style multiplex cinemas in India who are refusing to pay more to show what they say has been a string of loss-making turkeys.

The dispute has threatened to delay the release of dozens of titles and could cost the £1 billion-a-year Hindi-language movie industry tens of millions in lost ticket sales, analysts say.

The producers have demanded half of the revenue earned from their titles by multiplex cinemas, in line with what they said were standard terms in the West. “In most countries in the world, multiplex owners share a revenue of 50:50, so why not India?” Yash Chopra, one of the leading Indian film moguls, asked.

The owners of the new multiplexes, in a country where most people still watch films in single-screen cinemas, said that they could not afford such a split unless a film did particularly well. Currently they take as much as two thirds of the takings and say that the money is required to cover the cost of investment.

via TimesOnline

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