Bollywood Films

This post is in response to a comment asking about Western Film playing a Bollywood (Indian) film called Singh is Kiing. There is someone interested in renting Western Film to play that film. I'm not sure of the details yet.

Pretty much all of the Bollywood movies that have ever played at Western Film were other groups or people renting the theatre, we basically just showed the film and sold some concessions.

I tried running a few Bollywood movies myself a couple years ago but it didn't work. I wasn't able to promote it properly, largely because I wasn't sure how to reach them.

When I first started running Western Film there was a student who used to rent Western Film about once a month. She was able to pretty much fill the theatre every time. However that was a while ago and the piracy issue was nowhere near as bad as it is now.

If Hollywood think it has piracy problems they should be happy they aren't Bollywood. Once I was dropping tickets off at one of the Indian food stores for a showing in a couple weeks. The guy running the store rented out a VHS pirated copy of the film for $1.00 while I was there.

The main issue for playing Bollywood at Western Film is timing. It's best to be able to promote a specific date that's as close to the Toronto opening as possible. However there are only a few prints of each movie and they play Toronto first. Much as with the Hollywood product we have to wait until the prints finish in TO before we can play them. The Indian theatres in TO decide each Monday what they will keep so it's hard to set a date for a London showing.

I'm hoping this is one of the situations that will be fixed by a digital projector in a few years. They should be able to make as many copies as they want so we could probably open the same time as TO.