Why World’s richest film industry is courting India?

Bollywood has a long History of collaboration with Hollywood

By T N Ashok

From Amrish Puri’s terrifying villain in Temple of Doom to Irrfan Khan’s Oscar-adjacent brilliance, Indian actors have long graced Hollywood sets. Now, with 1.4 billion potential ticket buyers and a homegrown film industry that routinely out-muscles foreign competition, Hollywood’s courtship of India has become less a creative choice and more an existential calculation.

In the summer of 1984, audiences around the world watched a silver-haired Indian actor named Amrish Puri tear a beating heart from a man’s chest in a cave temple beneath the streets of an imaginary Pankot. As Mola Ram, the villain of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Puri was terrifying, magnetic, and utterly unforgettable. Hollywood had discovered something: India had actors of a different order entirely, performers whose classical training, physical expressiveness, and larger-than-life screen presence could electrify a Western audience on contact. What Hollywood did not yet fully understand was that this discovery was a two-way street — and that the traffic would only grow heavier with time.

Forty years later, the calculation is no longer simply artistic. It is financial, strategic, and increasingly urgent. India is now the world’s most populous nation, with 1.4 billion people and a fast-expanding middle class with disposable income and an insatiable appetite for cinema. Globally, the Indian theatrical market is projected to cross $2.5 billion by 2026. For Hollywood studios watching their traditional markets stagnate — domestic North American audiences aging, European cinemagoing declining — India represents not just an opportunity. It represents the future.

The history of Indian actors in Hollywood is, for most of its length, a history of restriction and stereotype. In the years before the turn of the millennium, the roles available to Indian performers were narrow: servants, mystics, terrorists, the exotic Other. Roshan Seth appeared alongside Harrison Ford. Kabir Bedi played an assassin in the James Bond film Octopussy. Om Puri — perhaps the most brilliant screen actor India ever produced — found work in City of Joy and The Ghost and the Darkness, both films set in the subcontinent, both requiring him to be, above all, legibly Indian.

Then came Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire in 2008. The film was not, strictly speaking, a Hollywood production in the traditional sense, but it functioned as a detonator. It introduced Western audiences to the visual and emotional vocabulary of contemporary India, won eight Academy Awards, and made international stars of Dev Patel and Freida Pinto overnight. More importantly, it proved something the studios had long suspected but been reluctant to act upon: that a film rooted in Indian reality could command global attention and produce extraordinary box office returns.

“When Irrfan Khan appeared on screen, the temperature changed. He didn’t ask for your attention. He simply had it — a quality that translates across every language and every market on earth”, said a leading film critic.

The actor who did the most to demonstrate this truth was not a Bollywood superstar in the conventional sense. Irrfan Khan, trained at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, built a Hollywood career through sheer force of craft. His appearances in The Namesake, The Amazing Spider-Man, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Ron Howard’s Inferno, and Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World were not tokenism. They were casting decisions based on the simple recognition that Irrfan Khan made every scene he was in better — and that his presence signalled to Indian audiences that a film was worth their time and money. His death in 2020 left a void that the film world, on both sides of the world, is still struggling to fill.

The strategy of casting bankable Indian names to unlock South Asian markets is now explicit studio policy. When Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol needed a marquee name recognisable to Indian audiences, it cast Anil Kapoor, a Bollywood icon for four decades, in a key supporting role. The film’s Indian marketing leaned heavily on Kapoor’s involvement. When Vin Diesel’s Fast & Furious franchise, always alert to emerging markets, wanted to expand its appeal in South Asia, Ali Fazal — star of the blockbuster Mirzapur web series — joined the cast of Furious 7. When Christopher Nolan shot Tenet, he cast Dimple Kapadia, one of Hindi cinema’s most revered actresses, in a substantial role. That casting generated enormous goodwill and press coverage in India before a single frame of the film had been seen.

The logic is elegant in its simplicity. A recognisable Indian face in a Hollywood production does not merely add diversity. It functions as an endorsement — a signal to audiences in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, and Bengaluru that this is a film made, at least in part, for them. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who built a genuine American television career through Quantico before appearing in The Matrix Resurrections, has spoken candidly about occupying this dual position: a star whose value to Hollywood studios is partly cinematic and partly geopolitical.

Even the most globally celebrated Indian icon has been drawn into this arrangement. Amitabh Bachchan, the man his countrymen have called the Angry Young Man, the Shahenshah, the living embodiment of Hindi cinema, appeared as Meyer Wolfsheim opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. The role was brief. Its significance was not. Bachchan’s involvement guaranteed extraordinary Indian press coverage for a film that might otherwise have passed almost unnoticed in the subcontinent’s multiplexes.

And yet Hollywood’s courtship is complicated by a problem the studios did not fully anticipate. India’s own film industry has not stood still while Hollywood circled. It has evolved, expanded, and — in some of its registers — become more cinematically adventurous than anything coming out of the American studio system.

The Pan-India blockbuster — a film produced in one Indian language and simultaneously dubbed into Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam, and Kannada for release across the subcontinent — has become a commercial force without precedent. S. S. Rajamouli’s RRR, an action epic of operatic ambition, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and grossed over $150 million worldwide, becoming a genuine global phenomenon. Prashanth Neel’s KGF Chapter 2 earned more in India in a single weekend than many major Hollywood releases earn in their entire theatrical run in the country. Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Leo, a Tamil-language crime thriller, sold out multiplexes in Singapore, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

These films are not modest art-house productions seeking niche audiences. They are spectacular, kinetically shot, emotionally overwhelming entertainments — and they are eating Hollywood’s lunch. The studios releasing them have mastered dubbing to a degree that makes language invisible; an audience in Hyderabad that speaks Telugu can watch a Malayalam thriller from Kerala with the same fluency as a native speaker. India has, in effect, created its own internal globalisation — a single, vast, linguistically integrated film market that does not need Hollywood’s product and is growing more confident by the year.

“India is not simply a market to be captured. It is a civilisation with its own cinematic language — and that language is now speaking loudly enough for the whole world to hear”, a leading trade analyst said.

This is the paradox Hollywood now inhabits. It needs India — needs its audiences, needs the credibility that comes with Indian star power, needs the box office cushion that South Asian markets provide when domestic returns disappoint. But India needs Hollywood less and less. Deepika Padukone’s appearance in xXx: Return of Xander Cage was a significant Hollywood moment for Indian audiences in 2017. Today, Deepika’s domestic films earn far more, with far greater cultural resonance, than any Hollywood cameo could generate.

The future is neither Hollywood conquering India nor India ignoring Hollywood. It is something more interesting: a genuine negotiation between two immense creative industries, each with something the other wants. Hollywood has global distribution infrastructure, technical resources, and a century of brand recognition. India has one of the world’s most passionate cinemagoing cultures, a tradition of storytelling that predates cinema itself, and actors — from the classical rigour of a Naseeruddin Shah to the blockbuster charisma of a Rajinikanth — who can hold a camera’s gaze like few people alive.

The deal being struck, film by film, casting announcement by casting announcement, is still being written. But its broad outline is visible: Hollywood will continue to cast Indian stars, dub its films into India’s major languages, and market aggressively to the subcontinent. And Indian cinema — unintimidated, increasingly globalised, technically sophisticated, and backed by audiences of hundreds of millions — will continue to grow into a rival that cannot be absorbed, only respected.

Amrish Puri, in his cave beneath Pankot Palace, holding that beating heart aloft, was the beginning of a story. We are now, somewhere, near the middle of it. The ending, the studios of Los Angeles and the production houses of Mumbai are only beginning to understand, belongs to no one yet. (IPA Service)