Cinema of India

India is a major regional center for cinema. The Indian film industry is the largest in the world (1200 movies released in the year 2002). The industry is supported mainly by a vast film-going Indian public, though Indian films have been gaining increasing popularity in the rest of the world — notably in countries with large numbers of expatriate Indians.

Genre conventions of commercial films

Commercial films, in whatever regional center they are made, tend to be:

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• Long — three hours, with an intermission.
• Musical — action is periodically interrupted by song-and-dance routines. Good movies use the routines to move the story forward; mediocre movies have them only because the audience demands them. Songs are sung by professional play-back singers and lip-synched by dancing actors and actresses.
• Melodramatic, sentimental, of mixed genre — they mix romance, comedy, action, suspense, etc.
• Sometimes Indian-styled remakes of popular Hollywood movies, thus continuing a long film-making tradition (global in scope) of imitations and creative remixes.