Bollywood develops US market savvy

As the Deepika Padukone-starrer Break Ke Baad opened in the United States on Wednesday, two days ahead of its release in India, it highlighted how 2010 has been the year during which Bollywood has become increasingly savvy when it comes to marketing its films in America.

As the Deepika Padukone-starrer Break Ke Baad opened in the United States on Wednesday, two days ahead of its release in India, it highlighted how 2010 has been the year during which Bollywood has become increasingly savvy when it comes to marketing its films in America.

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The release had been pushed ahead two days by the studio Reliance Big Pictures to take advantage of the Thanksgiving Day weekend. With Thanksgiving, a traditional American holiday, on Thursday, this meant that Break Ke Baad's target audience of youth, school and college-goers would have four days of holidays to watch the film.

The long weekend has been lucrative for Hollywood, which often plans major releases around them. In fact, this long weekend also saw Disney release a major film, Tangled. Gitesh Pandya, an industry analyst, said, "Usually, long weekends are very important because overall spending goes up. The thinking is if the audience is available, why not take advantage of an extra day or two?"

Aamir Khan's 3 Idiots had been a beneficiary of a well-timed release when it took advantage of the Christmas weekend at the end of 2009 and the subsequent New Year's weekend. It ended up making more than $6.5 million in the North American territory.

That is part of a new trend of Bollywood exploring new ways of exploiting the American market which is becoming more and more lucrative.