Bollywood loses Rs 150 crore in six months

MUMBAI: The year is halfway through, but Bollywood has very little to cheer about. More than Rs 3 billion ($70 million) has gone into making films, but half of the amount sank beyond recovery.

The ratio of success and failure in Bollywood has for the past many years been 5/6:100, it means, out of 100 movies released in a given year, only five or six manage to hit the jackpot.

The industry takes solace in the fact that of the 47 movies released in the last six months, at least two, "Race" and "Jannat", turned out to be genuine hits, bringing cheer to producers, distributors and exhibitors.

And, of course, they enthused the audience for giving value to its money.

"Race", an Abbas-Mustan-directed racy thriller, was an instantaneous success, unlike "Jannat".

Though an equally piquant movie based on the subject of match fixing in cricket, "Jannat" was a slow starter.

But eventually it reached the finishing line, doing a business of Rs 400 million on an investment of Rs 100 million. That's all that matters to merit it the status of being a hit movie.

UTV's mega budget "Jodhaa Akbar", which had big stars like Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai, did the major business in the first quarter of this year. But, with an investment of Rs 450 million, it was a costly production and a period movie at that, it took a long time for UTV to recover the cost, the reason being that the genre, popular with audiences till the early 1970s, lost its past flavour.