The rise of brand Bollywood

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Brand Bollywood is coming to the Gulf and it's not just the region’s burgeoning Indian population that is the big attraction. The all singing and dancing movie format is gaining in popularity among Arab audiences and leading to a wave of investment from the world’s biggest film industry.

Every Friday night the queues outside Dubai's Grand Cineplex get longer.

It could be a movie theatre anywhere in the world, except that most of the people in the line are not here to get their weekly dose of Hollywood.

They're here to watch the stars of Bollywood. The same scene is played out in cinemas across the booming emirate every weekend where posters for Hollywood blockbusters such as ‘Kung Fu Panda' and ‘Hancock' sit alongside others with titles such as ‘Love Story 2050', ‘Dashavatar' and ‘Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na.'

Bollywood is booming across the Gulf and it's about to get bigger as a wave of investment aims to establish the Indian film industry in Dubai. With a 3.8 billion-strong global fan base across 120 countries and revenues expected to top US$30bn by 2012, Bollywood is on the march.

At the same time, Hollywood is struggling to cope with falling audiences, declining box office receipts, rising production costs and strikes.

Bollywood produces about 1000 movies every year, more than twice as many as Hollywood, and now the industry is looking to expand its global appeal by establishing closer ties with the US film industry and exporting its biggest stars.

"I call Dubai the best city in India," says Akash Arora, who is investing about US$30m in a new animation production centre in Dubai that is aimed at producing Indian and Arab-themed animated movies where characters are based on Bollywood stars and mythological stories.

"India has come of age," says Arora who has started production on his first Bollywood-themed animated movie which he hopes to premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival next year.

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