Disney vies for Bollywood gold with Hindi movie

It's a marriage made in movie heaven. Bollywood and Hollywood, which have long peddled shared visions of chaste romance and unlikely friendships, today finally ties the knot with Disney's first Indian-made animated feature film in Hindi: Roadside Romeo. The movie, which took two years to make, tells the story of a pampered pet dog after he is abandoned on the streets of Mumbai. Released today, for the start of India's Diwali holiday weekend, the film is a joint venture between Walt Disney Pictures and Yash Raj Films. Being made in India meant the budget, thought to be $7m (£4m), was 15 times less than the average cost of Disney's Pixar movies such as Ratatouille. In a tacit admission that a talking mouse could not be repackaged for Indian audiences, Roadside Romeo features Bollywood songs and dance numbers and the voices of its leading couple, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor. Disney said it wanted to build a "brand that touches Indian families everyday, [and has] reach and relevance ... [Disney is] strong in building creative properties". And with a slump in cinema takings expected in the west there is a rush to tap into the Bollywood box office. Mahesh Samat, Disney's managing director in India, said: "India annually sees 3.6bn movie admissions ... [ticket prices are] expected to go up to 80 rupees [£1] in five years. Which means we are talking about a $7bn box office." Disney's new film is part of a trend that has seen tinseltown and India's "place of illusions" grow ever closer. Earlier this month Rupert Murdoch's News Corp struck a multi-movie deal with a top Bollywood producer. The actor Will Smith has a two-movie deal with Mumbai-based UTV, while the Indian billionaire Anil Ambani has invested $300m in Steven Spielberg's new DreamWorks film studio. But to make it big in Bollywood requires more than just importing foreign talent, scripts and actors. "Indian television is where US companies found out they could not just dub blockbusters into local languages. It does not work. Once they produced locally they struck it big. Murdoch did it with Star TV. So did Sony. So did Disney," said Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, a media consultant. "Now they have moved to cinema. "Movies are part of the cultural fabric of India ... People instinctively know here what doesn't feel Indian and they reject it pretty quickly." Failure to adjust to Indian tastes can be disastrous. Last year Sony Pictures became the first major US studio to produce a Hindi-language movie: Saawariya, or Beloved. But the romantic Bergman-esque film, based on Dostoevsky's White Nights, was trounced at the box office by a star-studded musical extravaganza Om Shanti Om. Disney's decision to hire an Indian animation firm, Elxsi, part of the giant Tata group, for Roadside Romeo was an acknowledgement of an unsung part of India's outsourcing success story. If you see a Hollywood blockbuster there is a good chance a chunk of its computer-generated imagery was made in India. One advantage Elxsi had was access to the Tata-built EKA, the world's fourth fastest supercomputer. "Because of the speed of the calculations required we could render the graphics much faster than anyone else," said Subramaniam Ramadorai, the head of Tata Consultancy Services.