Can Indian film ever go global?

Cowboys and Aliens was the biggest, shiniest fruit yet to fall off the tree planted in July 2009 by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks and India's Reliance Entertainment, when they signed a deal worth $825m in new funding to the American studio. You could see Cowboys and Aliens as a kind of metaphor, the comic-book mashup format symbolising the meeting of two disparate cultures. But we're not talking about Bollywood and Hollywood: there's nothing remotely Indian in the film. It's the way globalised entertainment culture, whoever is funding it, descends on local territories that I'm reminded of; a dazzling technological lightshow that interrupts daily life and then departs, leaving us scorched rustic cowpokes where we were standing. The showbiz ionosphere is what Reliance Entertainment hoped to reach when they hooked up with DreamWorks – but Cowboys and Aliens says that their ambitions are still earthbound. Harshly reviewed across the board, it is struggling to earn its $163m budget back: it's taken $96m in the US, and a very disappointing $50m overseas. It doesn't feel like Reliance had much creative input: the sight of Harrison Ford, from the last generation of old-school stars, spooning down the script's thin gruel, makes it clear this is a very American kind of shambles. What Reliance are attempting – to perform locally within India as a Bollywood production house, and step up to the international stage, too – is extremely difficult. But it is certainly in with a shout: a subsidiary of the Reliance ADA group owned by the Gujarati billionaire Anil Ambani, it has enormous resources, and owns studios, production facilities, radio stations, a record label – as well as 50% of DreamWorks. It claimed the top spot in India's all-time box office with 2009's college-campus comedy 3 Idiots. And with an estimated 25 million Indians abroad, its Bollywood output has a ready audience further afield: in July and August, it released as many movies in the UK as many of the US studios, including Bodyguard – at $13.38m near the top end of the Bollywood budget range. Reliance Entertainment's CEO, Amit Khanna, doesn't stint when he describes the next step. "We want to confront Hollywood on its own terrain," he recently told French author Frédéric Martel. Big words. But Hollywood's terrain is global, and it sets the operating rules on this level. Outside of the comfort zone of the insular Indian cinema scene (95% of Indian box office goes to homegrown films), Reliance doesn't seem confident enough to go it alone – hence the DreamWorks deal. This doesn't seem to be working out stunningly so far: Dinner for Schmucks barely made its budget back, and the sci-fi thriller I Am Number Four, starring Alex Pettyfer, managed a decent international haul. With Cowboys and Aliens, that makes a hit, a miss and a draw from three films – and not exactly the ones you'd choose to announce a new dawn in entertainment with. Perhaps they were just what DreamWorks had in the locker when the deal was signed, and Reliance's involvement will broaden and deepen from now on. The next few collaborations are a fraction more promising: the 3D Fright Night remake, $80m robot porn Real Steel, and The Help, which is currently steaming past the $100m mark in the US. The last has stirred up mild controversy – it's a civil-rights drama about African-American nannies that has irritated some black academics, because the original novel and its brand of "segregation lite" was written by a white woman, Kathryn Stockett. Reliance need more of this gamesmanship if they're going to write their own narrative. Khanna has also spoken about entering the mainstream fray in order to promote "Indian values", but the DreamWorks hookup doesn't seem like the place for that. Kites, the Las Vegas-set 2009 film re-cut into an "international version" by Brett Ratner to much PR fanfare, is the only sign so far that the company are thinking about how to repackage the Bollywood format for the global mainstream. But judging by its puny $1.6m US gross, it looks like Reliance will have to work a lot harder to get the world to think Indian; Danny Boyle came to similar conclusions when he pulled the song routine out of the main body of Slumdog Millionaire, and used it in the end credits instead. Two years on, the best that can be said is that it's business as usual on the DreamWorks/Reliance front. That might disappoint Khanna, a veteran lyricist for the Mumbai song foundries and a creative man who claims to have coined the "Bollywood" moniker. There's work to do if he's going to get to neologise for India's global triumphs.