Indian stars Himesh Reshammiya and Shweta Kumar will be lighting up our cinema screens. Photo / Supplied
SkyCity Cinemas is to permanently run Bollywood films in four of its theatre complexes in a bid to boost flagging revenues.
The WestCity, Queen St, Manukau and Centre Place Hamilton cinemas will each devote one screen to showing the Hindi language films.
The initiative was launched at the
newly opened Manukau cinemas this week.
The Mumbai-based film industry known as Bollywood produces over 1000 movies a year, twice as many as Hollywood. A 2004 report said more people globally watched Bollywood movies than Hollywood productions - 3.8 billion versus 3.6 billion.
The films average around three hours in length, are mostly musicals, and are subtitled.
General manager Jane Hastings said SkyCity Cinemas had been showing a few Bollywood films in recent months to gauge demand, and was pleased with the results. Some had pulled in as much as $250,000.
"Looking at the availability of product, and looking at the demand for it not only in the Indian community but in a wider community, we saw the opportunity to provide a permanent offering."
Robert Khan, managing director of Auckland-based Indian radio station Radio Tarana, predicted the move would be extremely popular. He said calls to the station complaining about the limited availability of Bollywood films in New Zealand were common.
"What's previously happened is a movie would run for three days and get taken off, or wouldn't even get here."
He said there was an outcry when one of the biggest hits of the year, a film called Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na starring American-Indian actor Imran Khan, never made it to this country.
Robert Khan said it might take SkyCity some time to get the selection of movies right, as not all the upcoming titles were blockbusters.
However he expected one due for release in December, Christmas with Ghajni, would be a big attraction.
At the company's annual results announcement in August, chief executive Nigel Morrison said SkyCity hoped to introduce more Bollywood, Cantonese and Mandarin films to appeal to a wider slice of the market.
Earnings from SkyCity's cinema business plummeted 44.8 per cent in the last financial year from $8.7 million to $4.8 million.
