Hollywood, Bollywood: Different but the same

My second tour couldn’t have been more different: Bollywood.

Bollywood Studios sits next to the international airport, which made for a long taxi ride from Colaba and would make for another one back. I was again expecting to be part of a big tour group, but there were three of us on the tour: an young Indian woman, her friend who had grown up in Canada, and me. Our guide was a young woman who moved quickly and had the efficient cheerfulness of someone who had given this tour many times.

The first stop was a sound studio, presented as a demonstration of Bollywood post-production. The demonstration took the form of karaoke. You sang, they showed you the waveform, then played it back with the audio improved to make you sound better. It was marketed as illustrative. The Canadian woman volunteered enthusiastically and delivered what I can confidently say was the worst karaoke performance I have ever witnessed. The engineers did what they could.

The second stop was a dance performance in a small theater, perhaps fifty seats. Four dancers ran through a sequence of Bollywood styles, followed by a movie quiz, then invited the audience on stage to join them. It was well done for what it was. What it was, though, was a tourist show rather than anything to do with actual filmmaking.

The third stop was different. We walked onto working sets with cameras running and crew moving around them. Our guide pointed out where to stand to stay out of shot, and that was the extent of the restriction. On one set they were recording a soap opera. Here: no photographs, no video. The reason was specific. Previous visitors had posted footage on social media, revealing plot lines and forcing the production to reshoot entire episodes. It made complete sense. This part was actual Bollywood. The rest had been entertainment.

A Brief History of Bollywood

The name blends Bombay (now Mumbai) with Hollywood, coined in the 1970s when the Indian film industry had already been running for six decades.

It started in 1913, when filmmaker Dadasaheb Phalke produced Raja Harishchandra, India’s first full-length feature film, in what was then Bombay. The city became the natural centre of Indian filmmaking, growing rapidly through the silent era, the arrival of sound in the 1930s, and the post-independence golden age of the 1950s and 60s.

Today Bollywood is technically the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, though the city also produces films in other languages, and India as a whole turns out cinema in over 20 regional languages across more than a thousand films per year. When people say Bollywood, they usually mean all of it. The industry is entirely independent of the Hollywood studio system: there are no major studios in the Hollywood sense, just a large number of production houses of varying size, the biggest being Dharma Productions, Yash Raj Films, and T-Series.

Bollywood films have a distinct grammar. Songs and dance sequences are integrated into dramatic narratives in a way that has no real equivalent in Western cinema. A single film typically contains five or six songs, choreographed and shot as set pieces, which are released separately as music videos before the film opens. The music is often as commercially important as the film itself. Stars cross between acting, dancing, and singing, sometimes all three in the same production.

The industry’s global reach is substantial. Bollywood films are the dominant cinema across South Asia and have large audiences in the Middle East, East Africa, and wherever Indian diaspora communities are established. Several films have crossed over into mainstream Western markets, most notably the works of directors like Mira Nair and films like Lagaan, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002.

Hollywood vs Bollywood: By the Numbers

Same suffix, very different industries. Hollywood has the budgets; Bollywood has the volume.

	Hollywood	Bollywood
Base	Los Angeles, California	Mumbai (formerly Bombay)
Founded	~1910s	1913
Films per year	~500–600	~300 Hindi-language; ~2,000 across all Indian languages
Tickets sold annually	~1.2 billion (North America)	~883 million (India, 2024)
Domestic box office	~$10 billion (2024)	~$2.2 billion (2024)
Studio system	5 major studios (Disney, Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, Sony)	Independent production houses (Dharma, Yash Raj, T-Series); no centralised studio system
Primary language	English	Hindi, with dubbing or subtitles into regional languages
Global box office	~$35 billion	Dominant in South Asia, Middle East, and Indian diaspora worldwide

The taxi back to Colaba took longer than the one out. Rush hour. I found a restaurant near the hotel, ordered chicken, was told it would not be spicy, and received something moderately spicy, which by that point in the trip I had stopped finding surprising. The waiter checked on me several times with what seemed like genuine concern. In the end I finished the entire (big) plate. It was delicious.

A Brief History of Bollywood

Hollywood vs Bollywood: By the Numbers

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