Bollywood goes global !
The Indian film industry, known as Bollywood, is the largest in the world. The “B” in Bollywood refers to the city of Bombay, now called Mumbai, the film capital of india. However, unlike the USA , where almost all major films are made by Hollywood studios, India has film studios in almost every major city. Between them, they turn out more than a thousand films a year, more than twice the output of Hollywood. About 14 million Indian people go to the movies every day, with more than four billion movie tickets sold annually, Compare this to the three billion tickets which are bought for Hollywood movies worldwide,
Many people believe that the 1940s and 1950s were the heyday(全盛时期) for Bollywood, when Indian movies combined energetic and vibrant singing and dancing with a melodramatic love story that focused on family values. Although the industry went through a slump after that, Bollywood bounced back in the 21st century, when the films became international hits, especially in Britain and America.
Nowadays , Indian Films still have fantastic songs and dance routines and the country’s top actors are major world stars. But the successful original formula has hardly changed. The films are colorful, the dancing is breathtaking and there are plenty of costume changes, The story is always the same : boy meets girl, they fall in love and they struggle for family approval. And the hero always has a comedy sidekick(伙伴).
But there is one big problem---piracy(盗版). Unscrupulous people make pirate copies of the films and sell them, thus depriving the pirate copies of much needed funds to make new films. Another problem is that younger generations sometimes find the stories a bit predictable and getting bored with the similar plotlines. But film-makers are trying to solve this by changing story lines to reflect real life. Recent films recognize the fact that many children ot indian families now study in the USA and other foreign countries.
Despite these problems, Bollywood continues to be the world’s number one producer of movies.