Bollywood needs better marketing - India filmmakers

Bollywood needs to learn from Hollywood's marketing skills and experiment beyond its typical song-and-dance productions to broaden its appeal, top Indian filmmakers said Friday at a conference in the Chinese gambling enclave Macau.

Ramesh Sippy, the director of one of the most successful Indian films of all time, "Sholay," and others praised the American industry during the 10th International Indian Film Academy weekend.

Calling Hollywood "a very aggressive marketing machine," Sippy said, "If the American way is the better way to get it (Indian movies) across to the rest of the world, adopt that."

Resul Pookutty, who won an Oscar for his sound engineering work on "Slumdog Millionaire," said Indian filmmakers tend to "go by that gut feeling" rather than relying on market research.

"We are not on a transparent level analysing our reach and trying to cash in on it. That's exactly what Hollywood does," Pookutty said. "They have studies. They have researchers. They analyse. And they pump up things. When something is going in a great way, they push it full throttle."

Bollywood films have a following throughout the Indian diaspora and beyond, with regular viewers in places like Britain, east Africa and Uzbekistan.

The Indian film industry is worth US$2.3 billion ($NZ3.58 billion), with foreign box office revenues accounting for 9.8 percent of total revenues in 2008, according to a report commissioned by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

By contrast, the American industry earned US$9.8 billion at the domestic box office in 2008 and another US$28.1 billion abroad, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.