India Finds ‘Jurassic Park’ a Real Scream : Movies: The blockbuster, being shown in Hindi and English, doesn’t fit the country’s film formula. But with 4 million tickets sold in three weeks, the nation’s industry might be forced to rethink what it’s been doing.

It came from Hollywood. It speaks fluent Hindi. And it’s frightening Indians by the millions.

In a watershed event for India’s film industry (some of whose moguls are said to be among the scared), for the first time a major Hollywood motion picture--”Jurassic Park”--has been dubbed into Hindi and lavishly promoted in an attempt to attract a mass audience in this film-adoring nation.

Steven Spielberg’s box-office blockbuster is devouring Indian filmgoers’ rupees with the speed and appetite of a velociraptor. Even people involved in bringing the movie to a Hindi-speaking public seem awed at the scale of their success.

“It’s the same steamroller function we’ve seen in the rest of the world,” Uday Kaushish, a New Delhi theater director involved in distributing both Hindi and English versions in North India, said. “It takes off, and there’s no stopping it.”

After a run of three weeks in some 260 theaters across the country, “Jurassic Park” racked up more than 4 million admissions, operators reported.

Its English-language version easily topped the gate of the former record-holder for that language, the Bruce Lee kung fu vehicle “Enter the Dragon.”

As for the Hindi-language print aimed at the less educated and much bigger general public, it drew very well, but still has a long, long way to go before it passes the more than half-billion tickets Indians bought from 1975 until last year to see “Sholay,” a gory Indian takeoff on “The Magnificent Seven.”

“What we have is the equivalent of a very good success for a Hindi film,” Kaushish said. “And the people it’s reaching represent a totally new segment altogether: middle-class family viewership. A lot of them confined themselves to cable TV, pirated videos and the like. But ‘Jurassic Park’ demands to be seen on the big screen.”

In provincial towns like Kanpur, Allahabad, Lucknow and Aligarh, where the English-speaking elite is smaller, the Hindi version has been an enormous crowd-pleaser.

In a feat akin to selling out a U.S. multiplex on the evening of the Super Bowl, in Loni near New Delhi, all “Jurassic Park” screenings on the first day were sellouts--despite the fact that India and Pakistan were meeting in the televised finals of cricket’s Australasia Cup.

The jolt for the filmmakers of Bombay, Madras and elsewhere is that “Jurassic Park,” its starring cast of genetically reconstructed lizards and the fast-paced story line mixing action, humor, special effects and cloying sentimentality, doesn’t fit preconceptions of what the Indian audience, Hindi-, Tamil-, Telugu-speaking or whatever, wants in a movie.

In this country, “Maine Pyar Kiya” (“I Loved”) the biggest hit in the last 75 years as well as India’s first magnetic four-track stereo production, is the dazzling epitome of the mass-market film: a musical love story including nine songs that have become part of popular culture.

The well-worn approach is called masala , the term for a melange of spices used in curries. Take a dash of music and some treacly or (nowadays) smutty songs, add a measure of violence and blood, provide a love interest, and you have the typical Indian film.

Starting now, “Jurassic Park” may compel what’s called “Bollywood,” or the Indian cinema industry based in Bombay, to rethink that formula.

“Now we can also make films with a different content from what we have been showing all these years,” producer Subash Ghai was quoted by one newspaper here as saying.

At New Delhi’s Shiela Theater, they can set their watch these days by the 11:20 a.m. appearance of the Tyrannosaurus rex alongside the halted Land Cruisers. The children occupying most of the 1,020 seats for the morning show scream and clap.

“I liked it because it’s scary,” Arvind Gopal, 10, who saw the movie with his class from the Shri Ram School, said afterward, his eyes still bright with excitement. “It’s very different from Indian movies. There is nothing so interesting in Indian movies. I learned that dinosaurs were the rulers 165 million years ago. I liked this movie very much.”

Over the years, a few other U.S. imports, including “Gandhi,” have been dubbed into Hindi. (The first appears to have been the classic silent “Thief of Baghdad,” with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., which was made into an Indian talkie with synchronous music and sound effects.)

What distinguishes “Jurassic Park” is its hefty promotion budget--Amblin Entertainment, Universal Studios and United International Pictures reportedly authorized $360,000. Cities like Bombay and Delhi are dotted with posters showing the familiar strutting T. rex skeleton and the movie’s title in Hindi’s dangling script.

The film may be packing them in, but due to prevailing box-office prices, India’s share in the movie’s overall global receipts should be slender. The highest ticket price is the equivalent of around 50 to 75 American cents, though scalpers are asking and getting up to $1.50. As of the middle of May, “Jurassic Park” has grossed just over $2 million in India.

As in many Indians’ daily speech, a few English-language expressions have been allowed to linger in the Hindi version. “Damn!” Richard Attenborough curses as his ambitions begin to go haywire. “God bless you,” a child tells a sneezing brachiosaurus .

Now that it’s been proven that Hollywood films have mass-market appeal in India, the obvious question is, what will they do for an encore? “Ghost” and “Pretty Woman” are expected to be among the next films in the Hindi-dubbing pipeline, Padmanabhan said.

The Bombay sound engineer sees “Jurassic Park” as a shot across the bow of the magnates of India’s own hyperactive film industry, which cranked out 836 feature films in 1992, a world record, but has been sorely wanting for blockbusters of late.

“Unless these guys get their act together, and they were in the doldrums in any case, this is a definite threat,” Padmanabhan said. “TV and the satellite TV had taken away quite a bit of our market, and now Hollywood is taking away a little more. Unless they improve their own quality standards, they are going to be in quite a bind.”