Slumdog Millionaire bombs in India

Think about this: if you live in India, and are either living the life in a slum, or are middle class walking or driving past slums everyday, or are the upper class where you have no concept of the reality of the slums, well, why would you want to go to a movie hall to watch a movie about slums, a kid in the outhouse falling into human shit that is underneath, the violence in the slums, the religious hatred that exists among a few Hindus and Muslims, ...... even though the movie is more about love, and doing the right things, ....?

It is no wonder then that

On Friday, a day after Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, the movie filled just 25% of the seats for its debut in theaters across India, the country of its setting. Buoyed by the hype the movie has generated in the U.S. — along with its Oscar nods and four Golden Globe awards, Slumdog on Sunday won the "best cast" award from the Screen Actors Guild — Fox Searchlight released 400 prints of the film across India last weekend. But while Indian critics have largely embraced the movie, audiences are staying away. Theaters showing the movie averaged 50% of capacity on Saturday

The Time report adds:

For many Indians, the film's subject and treatment are familiar to the point of being banal. A lot of Indians are not keen to watch it for the same reason they wouldn't want to go to Varanasi or Pushkar for a holiday — it's too much reality for what should be entertainment. "We see all this every day," says Shikha Goyal, a Mumbai-based public relations executive who left halfway through the film. "You can't live in Mumbai without seeing children begging at traffic lights and passing by slums on your way to work. But I don't want to be reminded of that on a Saturday evening." There is also a sense of injured national pride, especially for a lot of well-heeled metro dwellers, who say the film peddles "poverty porn" and "slum voyeurism."