Bollywood films constitute roughly 50% of all new films added by Netflix this week!
This week alone, Netflix announced 79 new Bollywood releases in their All DVDs Releasing This Week section. That’s more Bollywood films than films of any other sort of individual genre, probably almost as many films as released in all other categories combined. To give you an idea of how significant this is, just imagine if half the new releases at Blockbuster were Bollywood flicks!
The new films are pretty eclectic, with movies from the 1950s to the present, including golden oldie Shree 420 and compilation DVDs like Dance Songs Forever.
This comes in the same week that GV Films announced their intent to create a legal Bollywood (and Tamilwood [is that even a word? - ed]) film downloading system:
Film buffs worldwide will soon be able to download digitised versions of Indian movies from an online channel that will be launched in Mumbai in 2006. Movie lovers can download the movies by paying between $1-5 a movie, depending on how old the film is and whether it was a big hit — apart from its running time. GV Films is known for hit productions in Tamil like Mouna Ragam (1986), Nayakan (1987) and Anjali (1990). It has also bought rights of hundreds of other movies in various other Indian languages. Though the production house has a large library of nearly 6,000 films to pick and choose from, it is in the process of acquiring more movies. [Link]
What’s going on here? While GV films is targetting their offering specifically at NRIs, it’s not entirely clear to me who is renting the Bollywood films from Netflix. Is this clear evidence of the mainstreaming of Bollywood as “serious foreign film” or are these suburban uncles and aunties who don’t want to drive to little India to rent their desi DVDs any more than they want to drive to Blockbuster to rent their American films? One way or another, it’s a fascinating trend. For those of you interested in Bollywood (I’m afraid I rarely watch the movies, so the titles mean little to me) the list of films is below the fold.
Here’s the list of films released this week. It’s compiled from a list of all foreign films, so there may be one or two non-desi films improperly listed below:
