MUMBAI (Reuters) Bollywood struck gold in 2011, revving up lacklustre box offices in India with help from its leading men who wooed audiences back to cinemas after a dismal 2010.
“Bodyguard”, in which Khan plays a personal security guard to a rich man’s daughter and ends up falling in love with her, was the most successful Bollywood film, raking in more than 1.5 billion rupees ($28 million) at domestic box offices.
The solid performance contrasted sharply to the previous year when there were hardly any hits.
Other themes were successful, too.
But widely-hyped movies like superhero film “Ra.One” were a let-down.
Big studios like Reliance and UTV also have changed their business models, preferring to co-produce films rather than acquire them after completion. Last year, Reliance suffered losses after two big-ticket acquisitions, Mani Ratnam’s “Raavan” and Hrithik Roshan-starrer “Kites” flopped at box offices.
“Audiences have always loved the dilemmas of the hero, a little bit of action, some drama and some romance,” Lamba said. “We had a lot of that this year.”
Both “Bodyguard” and “Singham” were panned by critics but loved by audiences. And both featured strong central characters, harkening back to the 1980s and early ’90s in Bollywood when films were centred on the hero and his defeat of a villain in a battle of good versus evil.
“This year, all our films have been co-productions or our own productions and we have seen the successes,” Lamba said.
“We prefer to be creatively involved from the beginning of the project rather than coming in at the end in an acquisition scenario.”
Indian audiences also warmed up to Hollywood blockbusters including “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2″ and “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” — something that wasn’t seen until just a few years ago due mainly to Bollywood’s dominance of the box office.
“These days, the box office collections of good Hollywood films can rival those of a Bollywood film,” said Sunil Punjabi, chief executive of the Cinemax chain of multiplexes.
“The Adventures of Tintin,” which was released along with Ranbir Kapoor’s “Rockstar” in November, made more than 70 million rupees its opening weekend
(Editing by Elaine Lies and Bob Tourtellotte)
“Audiences and filmmakers have gone back and discovered stories that are close to our Indian roots,” said Sanjeev Lamba, Chief executive of Reliance Entertainment, which produced two of the year’s biggest blockbusters — “Bodyguard” and “Singham”.
“HARRY POTTER” HOT; “RA.ONE” NOT
“Balaji Motion Pictures made ‘The Dirty Picture’ at a budget of less than 300 million rupees but have chosen themes and subjects which are interesting, and (they) publicised their films so well that audiences have felt compelled to watch them,” said industry analyst Vajir Singh.
Offbeat films like “The Dirty Picture”, based on the life of a soft-core porn star, proved to be sleeper hits and took industry analysts by surprise. Together with the likes of “Singham” and “Bodyguard”, these smaller films proved audiences have an appetite for both mass market and niche-oriented work.
“It is not that more people are watching movies, but that the same audience is watching more movies,” said Shailesh Kapoor of Ormax Media, a firm that specialises in film market research.
In spite of a publicity blitzkrieg, actor Shah Rukh Khan’s film did not live up to expectations with around 1.2 billion rupees ($22 million) in net box office. That was just a bit more than its official budget of a billion rupees. Industry estimates put the film’s cost at over 1.5 billion rupees.
“Singham” told the story of a right-minded police officer who stands up to a corrupt politician and was accompanied by romance, drama and high-octane action.
Aside from that, for the most part, Bollywood managed to keep its purse strings in check, with production houses learning that budgeting a film right is half the battle.
Domestic revenues hit 19.25 billion rupees ($363.2 million) this year, up from 14.5 billion rupees in 2010, and an unprecedented four films crossed the billion rupee milestone. Two of those blockbusters starred actor Salman Khan.
In June, the French label Vionnet made its debut presentation in New York for Resort 2012. At a Chelsea loft overlooking the Hudson River, Rodolfo Paglialunga showed off his evolving collection (his ninth for the label) of languidly draped dresses in bold, graphic prints. New for Cruise were charming embellished knits. Here, in this Matteo Minasi-made video debuting exclusively on Style.com, we get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what went into the making of the presentation, from the casting of models like Caroline West by Andrew Weir, to the makeup artistry of Brigitte Reiss-Andersen.
Prabal Gurung Addicted To Love
Photos: Daniel Jackson / Courtesy of Prabal Gurung
The runway melody as Prabal Gurung’s Fall ‘11 collection: “Addicted to Love”—as interpreted along Florence + the Machine. It was a muse alternative. For his Fall attempting, Gurung channeled one of amour’s excellent addicts, the lovelorn Miss Havisham from Dickens’ Great Expectations. “It’s a paperback namely I was given when I was probably 6 or 7 annuals old,” the designer explains. “At that period I was variety of illegible about who she was—she’s a mad old madam, that’s what I thought. As I got older and kept going back to it, [I base that] there’s something exceedingly, extremely sad, yet always of us can somehow narrate apt her. There’s someone beautifully melancholic and romantic approximately giving anything up as adore, giving so many.” The result: a catwalk full of runway girls dreamed as youth, still hopeful merely yet fraying Havishams.
The persona lives again—just in time for the collection to hit stores—in the new branding images Gurung built for the 1st time with photographer Daniel Jackson, model Julia Saner, and his longtime stylist, Tiina Laakkonen. The images, debuting exclusively ashore Style.com, are no quite a war and will scamper online-only, but the designer doesn’t rule out print ad smudges at some time in the future. “For a fashionable company favor bomb, the medium allowance is very restricted,” he explained. “The resources that are online for free—Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr—it’s extremely crucial that we use those tools. These images [will] obtain picked up in China, picked up in irregular areas orthodox media would never reach.”
—Matthew Schneier
On Our Radar Yazbukey
Photo: Courtesy of Yazbukey
Everywhere in form, eyes are turning to the East: Asian models are flooding the catwalks, labels are staging shows in China, and brands are racing to open new and bigger stores to keep up with claim. The Paris-based jeweler Yaz Bukey is taking inspiration from Asia, too, whereas hers began a tiny closer to family. “I met a feng shui master that came to alteration my flat,” Bukey says. “When she went into my room, she asked what variety of energy I wanted. I told her I ambitioned sexual energy.”
No narrating if the feng shui master did gin up some extra sexual stamina for her bedroom, merely she did loan an eastern flair to Hong Kong Garden, the current collection from Yazbukey, the line Bukey designs with her sister, Emel. The label’s Plexiglas chips have been a favorite of street-style stalwarts for some time, thanks to their praying mingle of kitsch and class. “We have to be light for life is already hard enough,” Bukey tells Style.com. “This has got to be fun.” The latest is fair that, featuring yin-yang symbols and goldfish pendant pendants, along with others that have her signature lips and fingers, as well as a few nameplate pendants that read—in place of names—Amour, Maybe, and (ahem) Fuck You. A razor-sharp set of geometric chips takes its inspiration from the underworld—”there is a dingy side of it that’s more Hong Kong nightlife, sex, and mafia,” she explains.
In July, Bukey ambition display the collection at an installation she’s devising, influenced by the mart stalls set up at Paris’ black immigrants. “It’s an homage to the 18th arrondissement in the nineties, outstanding for their markets,” she says. “There’s going apt be entities ashore the wall, entities you tin purchase and pineapples and coconuts to dine.”
—Kristin Studeman
