his article is about the Hindi film industry. For the entire film culture of India, see Cinema of India.

For the tree species, see Bollywood (tree).

Not to be confused with Hollywood.

Hindi cinema
(Bollywood)

Main distributors AA Films

Fox Star Studios

Eros International

Reliance Big Pictures

UTV Motion Pictures

Yash Raj Films

Dharma Productions

Red Chillies Entertainment

Tips Music Films

Viacom 18 Motion Pictures

Excel Entertainment

Zee Studios

[1][2]

Produced feature films (2017)[3]

Total 364

Gross box office (2016)[5]

Total ₹15,500 crore ($2.31 billion)

National films India: ₹3,500 crore ($565 million) (2014)[4]

This article contains Indic

text. Without proper rendering
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Hindi cinema, often known as Bollywood and formerly as Bombay cinema,[6] is the Indian Hindi-

language film industry based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The term is a portmanteau of "Bombay"
and "Hollywood". The industry is related to Cinema of South India and other Indian film industries,
making up Indian Cinema—the world's largest by number of feature films produced. [3][7][8]
In 2017, Indian cinema produced 1,986 feature films, with Bollywood as its largest filmmaker,
producing 364 Hindi films the same year.[3] Bollywood represents 43 percent of Indian net box-office
revenue; Tamil and Telugu cinema represent 36 percent, and the remaining regional cinema
constituted 21 percent in 2014. [4] Bollywood is one of the largest centres of film production in the
world.[9][10][11] In 2001 ticket sales, Indian cinema (including Bollywood) reportedly sold an estimated
3.6 billion tickets worldwide, compared to Hollywood's 2.6 billion tickets sold.[12][13][14] Bollywood films
tend to use vernacular Hindustani, mutually intelligible by people who self-identify as speaking
either Hindi or Urdu,[15][16][17] and modern Bollywood movies[18] increasingly incorporate elements
of Hinglish.[15]
The most popular commercial genre in Bollywood since the 1970s has been the masala film, which
freely mixes different genres including action, comedy, romance, drama and melodrama along
with musical numbers.[19][20][21][22] Masala films generally fall under the musical film genre, of which
Indian cinema has been the largest producer since the 1960s when it exceeded the American film
industry's total musical output after musical films declined in the West; the first Indian musical talkie
was Alam Ara (1931), several years after the first Hollywood musical talkie The Jazz Singer (1927).
Alongside commercial masala films, a distinctive genre of art films known as parallel cinema has
also existed, presenting realistic content and avoidance of musical numbers. In more recent years,
the distinction between commercial masala and parallel cinema has been gradually blurring, with an
increasing number of mainstream films adopting the conventions which were once strictly associated
with parallel cinema.