Bhushan Kumar (center), chairman and managing director for Super Cassettes Industries Ltd., also known as T-Series, with music composer and singer Tanishk Bagchi (right) and Neeraj Kalyan (left), president of T-Series, at a listening session in Mumbai on Sept. 25.
Photographer: Mahesh Shantaram for Bloomberg BusinessweekInside the Most Watched YouTube Channel in the World
India's T-Series built an online empire from Bollywood. Now it has to survive Netflix.
On a recent afternoon in the Arabian Desert, with the temperature hovering around 40C, the cast and crew of Street Dancer 3D are trying very hard to pretend they’re in London. Starring two of Bollywood’s biggest young stars, Varun Dhawan and Shraddha Kapoor, the movie tells the story of rival dance crews facing off on the British capital’s mean streets. But because of the tiresome bureaucracy required to close actual London streets to blast Bollywood music for 10 hours at a time, the dance battles are being shot outside Dubai, in a theme park’s mock French village.
To create the illusion of a London neighborhood, or at least a South Asian audience’s idea of one, the crew has strung Union Jacks across the village square and parked an array of borrowed sports cars on the cobblestones. Multicultural extras are wilting in the hoodies and coats they’re wearing to ward off the nonexistent English chill, and makeup artists are working furiously to hide everyone’s sweat. Between takes, a small man with a tote bag rushes in to shade Kapoor under an umbrella.