100 Years of
Bollywood

In the 1920s, 17 out of every 100 films were about mythology. Filmmakers had a new technology and used it to show what people already believed in.

Then Partition happened.

In the 1940s, 53 out of every 100 films were social dramas. That is the highest share any single genre has ever held in this dataset. A country breaking apart needed stories about itself.

By 1947, studios released 169 films in a single year. It remains one of the most recorded years in the dataset.

Mythology, which defined the 1920s, fell below 2% by the 1950s and never recovered.

From 34% in the 1950s, social films fell to under 1% by the 1970s. Drama filled the space.

In the 1970s, 50 out of every 100 films were dramas. That figure has not been matched in any other decade in this dataset.

This was the decade of the angry young man. Writers Salim-Javed gave Amitabh Bachchan dialogue about class and injustice. Deewar and Sholay both released in 1975. Both are still discussed as landmarks of Hindi cinema.

Mythology fell to under 1% and did not return.

Action went from 14% in the 1970s to 28% in the 1990s. The peak years were 1988 and 1989. In both years, more than 1 in 3 films in the dataset were action films.

The 1980s also brought cable television and video cassettes. Studios responded with spectacle.

Romance grew alongside action, reaching 22% by the 1990s. DDLJ released in 1995 and ran in one Mumbai theatre for over 25 years.

The chart below shows every year from 1925 to 2017. Each dot is one year. The action surge of the late 1980s and 1990s is visible as a cluster at the top of the peak band.

Comedy went from 8% in the 1990s to 23% in the 2000s. Thriller and crime films doubled from 8% to 18% in the same period. Action fell from 28% to 12%.

The multiplex arrived in Indian cities. Ticket prices rose. The audience that could afford them wanted something different from what single-screen crowds had watched before.

A 2023 peer-reviewed study found that among the top revenue-earning Bollywood films, romantic and family dramas fell sharply after 2000, while comedy held steady as the most stable genre at the box office.

In 2010, the dataset records 134 films. By 2019, that number is 7. By 2022, it is 10. By 2023 and 2024, it is fewer than 10 each year.

This does not mean fewer films were made. The dataset coverage becomes sparse after 2012. Genre information is almost entirely absent for films recorded after 2018.

The drop in recorded films from 2013 onward reflects a data limitation, not a collapse in production. No claims about genre trends are made for this period based on this dataset alone.

What is separately documented: film sector revenues fell 62% in 2020, and between 1,000 and 1,500 single-screen theatres closed permanently that year, according to the FICCI-EY Media and Entertainment Report 2021.