Why Does Bollywood Need to Copy Hollywood?

Bollywood - The common name for the Indian (Hindi) film industry apes Hollywood in so many different ways. However, the worst of them is the blatant plagiarizing that constantly takes place in B-wood.

There is definitely no shortage of money or creativity in Bollywood, still the need to copy everything that Hollywood does is immense. The storylines and scripts are often copied (mostly without giving due credit to the original). Some of the examples here include the Bollywood movie "Murder" which was largely a copy of "Unfaithful", "Main Aisa Kyon Hoon" which was a near-copy of "I am Sam", "Kyonki Main Jhoot Nahin Bolta" which was a copy of "Liar-Liar", and "Partner" which was a clone of "Hitch" and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Apparently, the directors and producers like to take the easier and shorter route, than to go all the length of conceptualizing, developing a story, scripting it and developing the characters before actually making the movie. This eases the job for them in 2 ways:

- First, the obvious one is that they don't have to rack their brains trying to look for sellable plots.

- Secondly, they spend way less in conceptualizing and more in the actual end product, making their work less tedious and their projected profits higher.

This playing safe, however takes a toll on the people who are really creative. That is because they find fewer buyers who are willing to risk money on new and untested stories. Also, this brings to the fore the tendency to blatantly plagiarize somebody else's work without giving ANY credit whatsoever to the owner.

There are some exceptions, however to this rule. A recent example here is the case where the famous emotional drama "Stepmom" (starring Julia Roberts) was adapted into the movie "We Are Family". The opening credits specifically mentioned that the movie's story was taken from Stepmom. In this case, the copying cannot be called "plagiarizing", rather it is more of an adaptation or can be said to be "inspired from" the original... or maybe a "remake".

As long as the inspiration is only limited to getting ideas and does not extend to the point of blatantly copying stuff, it is very much acceptable. However, if Bollywood keeps on aping Hollywood like the way it is doing right now, then we can safely say that the future of B-wood is not very bright. Come on, guys let's give the next generation a reason to be proud of us. Let's create something that others would want to copy from us and not the other way around.