Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
SAN JOSE, Calif. – It’s 8 p.m. Friday, and the Towne Theatre downtown is sold out. About 500 moviegoers have crowded into the three-screen movie house, paying up to $12 a ticket to watch not the latest Hollywood blockbuster but instead the premieres of three Indian movies that are opening simultaneously in India.
Tonight’s showcase feature: the Tamil action thriller “Aadhavan” starring Surya Sivakumar, who enjoys rock-star status among fans known to break out in cheers when his image appears on screen.
As couples, parents pushing children in strollers and bands of young men stream into the 81-year-old theater, past the concession stand selling popcorn, mango juice and Indian fruit bread, an employee of the film’s distributor is showing his gratitude.
He hands out doughy sweets called laddu, wishing patrons a “Happy Diwali” in Tamil, a salutation of the Hindu festival celebrating the victory of good over evil.
“If you go to the AMC theater, they don’t play South Indian movies. This is our only option,” said Sudhakar Desireddy, a software engineer for Cisco Systems Inc. and a Towne Theatre regular who sometimes attends showings twice a week. “There are so many Indians here in the South Bay. The demand here is huge.”
Welcome to one of the few bright spots for the stagnant U.S. movie theater industry: Indian cinema.
As the Indian film industry has mushroomed – surpassing Hollywood as the most prolific producer of movies – distributors of Bollywood and regional Indian films have been eager to broaden their global appeal, especially in the U.S., which accounts for as much as 70 percent of their movies’ foreign box office.
The U.S. has a fast-growing and affluent population of about 2.5 million Indian Americans.
The Bay Area alone is home to an estimated 215,000 ethnic Indians, many of whom work in the Silicon Valley’s high-tech industry and are hungry for entertainment from their home country.
Hoping to cash in on that appetite is Big Cinemas, India’s largest movie theater chain. Big Cinemas is a division of Reliance, the Mumbai-based conglomerate controlled by Indian billionaire Anil Ambani that is also bankrolling Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio. In the past 18 months, Reliance has assembled a group of 18 theaters, with most offering a mix of Indian and Hollywood films.
Big Cinemas’ goal: to build the nation’s first theater circuit catering to Indian Americans and other ethnic groups passed over by the major chains.
It plans to open half a dozen more theaters targeted to Indian American audiences in Los Angeles – it already has a theater in suburban Norwalk – and in Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Tampa, Fla..
“What we found is that there is a critical mass of audiences in the U.S., but they are underserved,” said Uday Kumar, who oversees Reliance’s Big Cinemas operation in North America. “We saw an untapped demand.”
Big Cinemas is spending $12 million to renovate theaters with new digital projectors and sound systems, computerized accounting controls, stadium seating and concession stands serving Indian food.
