Hollywood Bollywood Pictures

Indian film actor Abhishek Bachchan is not quite the world's biggest star of the world's biggest cinema—that would be his dad, Amitabh Bachchan, a sort of Clint Eastwood/Harrison Ford/Sean Connery rolled into one—but he's close: He and fellow stars of the Mumbai-based movie industry known as Bollywood (i.e., Hollywood in Bombay, the city's former name) collectively appear in 800 to 900 films a year—making India the single largest producer of motion pictures. While India's roughly $1.5 billion-dollar annual box office may pale next to Hollywood's, which drew $1.028 billion domestic gross in January 2009 alone, the lavish, escapist musicals in which Bollywood specializes draw a massive audience throughout Asia, the Middle East, the British Commonwealth, and even such far-flung markets as East Africa, the Caribbean and the former Soviet Union, and have prompted recent co-productions with Sony, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Pictures.

"We prefer 'the Indian film industry,'" he says gently. "We're the largest film industry in the world, we make the most amount of films in a year and sell the most amount of tickets, so I think we have our own identity. We have the utmost respect for Hollywood and the films made in the United States, but I think it wouldn't be fair to name the Indian film industry after Hollywood. Unfortunately, it's come to stick and it's in the dictionary and I don't think we'll get away from it."