All Flops! Bollywood in the doldrums

Rediff is ranking all of this week's top-ten Hindi films as flops.

It's not that shocking: most films released in India lose money, and studios and producers apparently depend upon the occasional "super-hit" to stay in business. Still, this is the first time I've seen a complete sweep of flops; it must be a real dry spell.

Then again, how reliable is Rediff on this? Hindi film sites generally give very little concrete data on box office returns -- as in Rupee amounts. I gather there isn't a reliable national system for precisely measuring them, so perhaps all this talk of "flop," "average," "hit," and "super-hit" is a bit subjective. Or perhaps I just haven't found a consistently updated website or news source that does this? Neither Rediff nor Yahoo India currently give exact numbers in their weekly summaries.

I still want to see Kisna, which promises to be visually intense. And I'm curious about how they handle the interracial angle (is this the first major bollywood film that puts such a relationship at the center of the film?).

But I'm not at all curious about Black, which just looks melodramatic and overblown.