How Hindi films edged closer to Hollywood over the past decade

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A typical Indian film comes packed with action, drama, romance, comedy and thrill, all in a span of two to three hours. The complex roller-coaster ride of emotions, themes and characters is what sets Bollywood apart. However, as is clear in recent years, the ingredients of the masala mix of Hindi films have been changing to appeal to the taste of the millennial fan.

The change is not limited to short films and focused plots. Film-goers know that Romeo and Juliet love dramas are no more the norm, and the comedy of the one-odd Golmaal of the 1970s is more frequent now than ever. Biographies of sporting and political heroes, unheard of decades ago, are now rising in numbers. Where does Bollywood’s inspiration behind the changing genres lie? As data analysed by Mint shows, the answer could be another industry halfway across the world: Hollywood.

Hollywood’s journey has been comparatively stable for decades, but Bollywood’s not so. After experiments over the years, the 2010s were the first time that both industries appeared to converge more than ever before, genres listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) show.

Here’s how. The most common genres in Hindi films in the 2010s were drama, comedy and thrillers, as how Hollywood has always been. This means that for the first time in the era of colour films, the action genre did not figure in the top three, and romance, too, took a hit, continuing the decline it has seen since the 2000s. This historical analysis of Bollywood’s film genres is based on film profiles from IMDb, a user-driven portal dedicated to all things films.