World's Largest Movie Releases Per Year - It Happens Only in India
By Frank Ravtiz

India takes its stand as one of the oldest film industries in the world. During the early 1913 is when an Indian film received a public screening. The first director to venture into the film industry and to make it a grand success was 'Dadasaheb Phalke'. With his movie, 'Rajah Harischandra' had an extraordinary success due to the exuberant response of Indian masses. Since then, the Indian Film Industry never looked back.

Hence started the burgeoning of Indian Film industry and the growth of its caliber to continue doing so. In 1931, introduction of sound in the films started the format in Indian films establishing song and dance as part of the storytelling. It also split the film industry along language lines: these broadly being the Hindi belt in the north and the two other major language blocks in the south along with the existing languages. Thus India could build a distinct indigenous industry to serve its cinema-crazy, predominantly illiterate audience.

The golden age of Indian cinema arrived at 1950's where the actors and the beautiful actress' became the gods and goddesses, along with directors producing spectacular and powerful films. Hence the film-stars ruled not just the industry but also the hearts of the Indian film goers. This era also introduced playback singing, giving rise to singers dominating the music industry for the next half century.

Films ran themes of social issues that interrogated not only the institutions of marriage, dowry, and widowhood, but the grave inequities created by caste and class distinctions that received the obvious reactions from the Indian masses. A few others that had mythological touch from the Indian Epics and the others with the Indian History retold.

Movies with a handsome hero and beautiful heroine spun love stories with musical or dance sequences, of course with the heinous villain as encumbrance to the sweet romance of the couple, adding to a lot of action between the duo became a grand success and since became the main subject of most movies that were to come. The next generation of the film-stars inherited the role and stage of their senior legends. These new stars radically changed the landscape of the Indian entertainment industry with more of glamor and sensuality continuing to be the order of the day. The big budgeted movies were shot at international locations to get the attention of the viewers and grab the blockbuster positions.

At the turn of the millennium, Indian movies have seen the markets and the expectations of 'Bollywood's' traditional audiences change irrevocably. Films dealing with the current affairs and those that contained revolutionary ideas took the lead to break the normal love story or love triangle that had become the popular story base. With media rising to a new dimension, advance technology and the expansion of its horizons, 'Bollywood' released more number of films with different story lines thus rising to be the world's largest film producing industry. Not just capturing Indian viewers but also the movie buffs around the world, making its mark in the film industry overseas. The future of Indian film's success depends on whether it can change and adapt to the demands of this new market without losing its core identity; and whether the rest of the world will accept it when it has.