As Bollywood touches its half-way mark in 2016, the industry looks back at a rather slow box office while Hollywood movies stand tall after causing quite a stir in the domestic market during last six months. The biggest example has been The Jungle Book, which created history of sorts at the Indian box office. The film released a week before its US premiere to avoid clashes with Fan.
Megastar Amitabh Bachchan finds this move an ‘alarming threat’ to Bollywood.
“We have to fight them. This is competition. We know that Hollywood is very powerful. Wherever it has gone, it has destroyed the local film industry. Be it United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain or Japan, everywhere they go they just take over and that’s what is happening here. So we have to fight. Competition is good,” Amitabh Bachchan told The Indian Express.
He narrated an event that took place in his life nearly 20 years ago. Several companies such as Warner Bros, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox used to invite Bachchan but he only ignored them. After listening to the advice of a lawyer friend in New York he finally met them, it was the same lawyer who told him ‘go back home ,go back to your country because the Americans are coming. So get your house in order’.
It was then he opened a production house, Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Ltd (ABCL).
Presently the actor is gearing up for his upcoming film, TE3N. The film deals with child trafficking. On asking him on that issue he said, “Children’s safety is an important issue, though the film does not entirely focus on this aspect. It is a thriller, a film that wraps you around a grandfather, played by me, looking for and trying to find the missing pieces of the death of his grandchild. I liked the idea of the story and I was comfortable working with Sujoy and Ribhu, both of whom I had worked with before.
“This is an abominable crime and the guilty must be punished. Children too must be protected and more importantly educated and taught to bring such occurrences to the attention of elders and the authorities. Most children at that young impressionable age, are too frightened to speak about it,” he added.
