Kuch Kuch Data Hai: Bollywood, visualised

We are a film-crazy nation. Bollywood and India’s regional cinema together produce over a thousand movies a year, to entertain the world’s most populous country.

Some of the easiest conversations I’ve had with strangers often start over a film or film-star. Everyone has opinions, favourites, loyalties, hot takes, sometimes plain gossip. We say that movies are getting longer and louder, that the industry is running out of ideas, that audiences don’t go to theatres anymore, that everything is a remake, that actresses have a shelf life. In a star-obsessed country, films shape public mood and hugely influence how we speak, dress, and dream.

For an industry that entertains a billion-plus people, numbers matter. Every project carries investment in production, distribution, marketing and is judged based on footfalls on first-day-first-show, budgets, ratings, reviews, box-office returns. Every release leaves behind a long data trail after the opening-weekend chatter fades.

I’ve spent the last few years following that trail, labelling film data to see what the chatter looks like when you quantify and plot it. These small experiments have grown into a series of visual stories about the economics of movie-making in Bollywood, its risk-reward dynamics, on and off-screen representation, and changing tastes of audiences.

Using charts from my own work, and some that have inspired it, I’ll walk through these visual projects and the process behind them to show how data visualisation can help us read the script behind our movies.

This is a lightning talk. I hope you’ll leave inspired by how films, music, media, art, pop culture we obsess over, can be a rich and fertile ground for visual exploration.