Hollywood meets Bollywood. Steven Spielberg will be leaving Paramount Pictures and partnering with India’s Reliance Big Entertainment. Paramount Pictures and Dreamworks have already divided up about 200 projects in the DreamWorks development pipeline. Next step, Spielberg is getting about $500 million from India’s Reliance Big Entertainment and another $700 million that JPMorgan Chase to set up his new company. The new Dreamworks studio will invest $1.5 billion in film production and is expected to roll out about 30 movies over four years.

Reliance offers a large growth opportunity for Spielberg. The Indian film industry produces more than 1,000 movies a year and is growing 17%-20% annually, but still smaller than Hollywood. Clearly, Reliance wants to be a bigger player in the entertainment and media industry. With major Bollywood talent booked for several years into the future, the place to collaborate is Hollywood. At Cannes earlier this year, Reliance announced deals to make films with the production firms of Hollywood stars Nicolas Cage (Saturn Productions), Jim Carrey (JC 23 Entertainment), George Clooney (Smokehouse Productions), Tom Hanks (Playtone Productions) and Brad Pitt (Plan B Entertainment), and filmmaker Jay Roach (Everyman Pictures). With the addition of Spielberg, India’s Reliance Big Entertainment has a huge opportunity to grow bigger.

As the trend of collaboration between Hollywood and Asian film studios continues, get ready for more crossover films and hopefully Asian/Asian American faces on the big screen.

Steven Spielberg goes Bollywood