The Indian film industry is going places, with the Hindi blockbuster Dangal recently making headlines for setting new box office records in China. On the one hand, India continues to churn out more feature films and accounts for the largest number of cinema goers compared to any other country in the world. On the other, India is not at the top on criteria like box office earnings and screen distribution per capita.
The output of the Indian film industry has doubled in over a decade - from about 1,000 'national' feature films in 2005 to 1,907 in 2015, reveals data updated recently by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics on 93 countries, covering aspects of cinema production, exhibition and distribution for the 2015 reference year. UNESCO describes feature films as those with a with a running time of 60 minutes or longer, including works of fiction, animation and documentaries, intended for commercial exhibition in cinemas. Films produced exclusively for television broadcasting, newsreels, commercials or those in video format or rated X (adult films), are excluded.
Along with Nigeria, which stands second, India towers above other countries in the charts; in comparison China and the United States produce fewer than 1000 films a year. Not surprisingly developing countries accounted for 59% of global movie production in 2015.
India also accounts for more cinema goers than any other country in the world. Cinema theatres in the country saw more than 2,016 million admissions in 2015. China, which is ahead of India in terms of population, came a distant second with 1,260 million admissions. These two countries and the US accounted for the bulk of global admissions. Though the numbers are huge, they have to be seen in perspective - China falls behind, compared not only to India but all other countries that occupy the top 10 places for admissions, when its population is factored in.
Several countries with smaller populations have accounted for a proportionately larger number of admissions, USA being a striking example. With 1,197 million admissions, it nearly is on par with China on this count, though it has a much smaller population. This is true of many of the countries in the top ten - South Korea, France, UK and Mexico all account for a proportionately larger number of admissions when their population sizes are taken into account.
The admission trends have not been steady in India, the numbers were above 3,000 million from 2000 to 2008, having touched nearly 4,000 million in 2006. Admissions had also been in the 2,600 to 2,800 million range between 2009 and 2012.
But the story is different when it comes to earnings; here America dominates overwhelmingly. India's box office earnings of 1.9 billion dollars in 2016 was dwarfed by the 11.4 billion dollars grossed by US and Canada, going by statistics compiled by the Motion Picture Association of America. India stands fourth on this count, behind China and Japan, which is marginally ahead with 2 billion dollars. China, with earnings totalling 6.6 billion dollars, was way ahead of India.
Besides, a decade's gross box office figures seems to suggested that China's growth has been more steady when compared to India's, and that several other countries have also witnessed such sustained growth.
In terms of the number of screens, India stood third in 2015. It had a total of 11,100 screens, with the US and China occupying the first two slots. The numbers seem substantial, but again, these figures do not tell the whole story. For instance, the US, with a much smaller population boasts of more than 3 times the number of screens that India has. China with more than 31,000 screens did better than India when compared with the US, which had 40,000 odd screens.
The figures relating to the per capita availability of screens paint a different picture of the cinema screening infrastructure of these countries. India with only 0.9 screens per one lakh inhabitants drops to the bottom of a list of 69 countries for which data is available; only 12 countries have a lower figure. In comparison, the US heads the list with 14 screens, and even smaller countries like France, New Zealand and Ireland all have per capita numbers in excess of 10.
China's track record has been impressive - the growth in the number of screens has been steady and significant over the past year. From just over 3,000 screens in 2005, the number crossed 10,000 in 2012 and 20,000 in 2014. In comparison the number of screens in India has not risen significantly, going by the UNESCO data. Not surprisingly, China is expected to emerge as the biggest box-office market in the world, in the not too distant future.
