crossover cinema

Crossover cinema, a term used to define a film, which initially is targeted for a narrow specialty market, but later, achieves acceptance in a wider market. The credit of course goes to director Gurinder Chadha who debuted with her much-acclaimed film Bhaji on the Beach in 1993. This was the beginning of crossover cinema. Nagesh Kuknoor gave it a stroke with Hyderabad Blues in 1998.
Soon followed the film, Monsoon Wedding, a bona fide success story, which earned $14 million in the States. While Monsoon Wedding includes a little singing and a little dancing, it's largely a family melodrama whose musical moments remain firmly rooted inside a naturalistic world, rather than the fantastical, kitschy universe that invades the typical Bollywood narrative. (It's also mostly financed by the Independent Film Channel.) The same goes for international co-productions such as The Guru -- and to a lesser extent Bend it like Beckham -- which borrow from Bollywood without being Bollywood.
American audiences got their first true taste of genuine movie-masala with Lagaan, the Oscar nominated four-hour crowd-pleaser about a cricket match rivalry between Indian locals and British colonialists. The film made about $29,000 in States Devdas, an epic about a forbidden low-caste-high-caste romance, which was the first most expensive crossover film ever made in India, Devdas broke opening box office records at Cannes.
The growth of the Crossover films is evident from the fact that the Indian audience is a rapidly growing market in

North America, filled with avid filmgoers raised on Bollywood product. Recent U.S. census figures put the Indian population at 1.9 million. That's a healthy number of tickets, but compared to other minorities, such as Hispanic (31.3 million) or Chinese (2.7 million), the figure is relatively small.
Around the world, comparably, the market for Hindi films is strong. A recent article in news daily set the overseas value at $50 million a year, with Bollywood product selling well in the U.S., the Middle East, the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, and several other locales.
Crossover movies and crossover audience have led to the acceptance of the small budget movies in the global market and have opened new streams and sources of revenue for them. This explains why U.S. companies and Indian big banners have recently joined the Bollywood fray. 20th Century Fox is producing its first Hindi feature There Was A Beautiful Girl and Marigold, a U.S-Indian co-production is being touted as the first Bollywood movie to be made by a U.S. director, Willard Carroll (Playing by Heart). The film, which will be shot in both English and Hindi, tells the story of a B-movie actress stranded in India who takes a job on a Bollywood musical, with the set-up allowing for musical numbers to be integrated American-style seamlessly into the narrative. Rakesh Roshans Kites is being made at a huge budget of 60 crore starring the Latino beauty Barbara Mori with Hrithik Roshan. Even though there's mimimal dialogue in the film, most of it is not Hindi but Spanish, French, Filipino and other dialects.
The growth of crossover films have became very prominent in Indian Cinema. This is an attempt to mirror the changing reality. In fact Indian cinema can even be said as maturing slowly. Though the future of these kinds of films can’t be predicted with certainty.It is however undeniable that crossover films are increasingly being accepted and liked globally