Indian films and TV shows have been attracting American viewers since at least the early 2000s, when Indian diaspora communities began growing Bollywood’s foreign ticket sales. But now, thanks to new deals with U.S. streaming services, those audiences may be poised to really explode. Reuters reports that Indian production giant Eros International is in early talks with Amazon, Netflix, and Apple for the rights to its library of over 3,000 Indian films, a deal that could be worth about $1 billion. Should Amazon win the rights, the Eros library would join the over 600 movies and series in Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi available on its Heera subscription channel, which the company launched in March of this year.
Reports of the talks with Eros are good news for American audiences looking for more media centering people of color as characters and filmmakers. And as recent box office hits like Girls Trip, Get Out, and The Big Sick have demonstrated, the market for such media can be huge. But films and TV from India are particularly attractive to streaming platforms working to gain more global market share. As The Hollywood Reporter explained in December, India is home to the most internet users in the world after China. And the demand is high there for locally-produced content.
Those factors plus the country’s long-booming Bollywood industry make it highly desirable to Apple, Amazon, and Netflix. Their interest means, in turn, audiences outside of India and Indian diasporic communities will be exposed to what the subcontinent has to offer. Even network television is getting in on the interest. Indian actor and Miss World 2000 Priyanka Chopra is producing a show for ABC about the life of Bollywood star Madhuri Dixit, who will also act as the show’s producer. Bollywood veteran Sri Rao is signed on to write the pilot.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the hype over the Indian market is its intersection with streaming platforms’ focus on original content. On August 3, Netflix announced two new Indian original series, Selection Day and Again, will be joining its global streaming offerings, which will also include the as-yet-unreleased Sacred Games, the company’s first Indian original series announced last year. Those series, along with recent original productions like The Incredible Jessica James and stand-up specials like Ali Wong: Baby Cobra, Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, and Aditi Mittal: Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say, show that at least one streaming company is seeing the value in investing in creators of color at home and abroad, rather than just licensing their work once they’ve already proven to be successful.
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As much tired white nonsense as there is to be found on television and streaming services today, it’s always encouraging when large American companies make concrete moves to actually invest in creators of color and look beyond the types of content they have focused on in the past.
