Bollywood, India’s thriving movie business, is set to take on the West and will one day threaten Hollywood’s control, a report said.

"Bollywood are at the inflexion point - where Hollywood was in the 1930s and 1940s. In five years there will be a lot of marriages that will shape the industry for the next 50 years," Kishore Lulla, chief of Eros International, told.

Lulla expected a spate of consolidation that would boil India’s 25 film producers - many of them regional players working in Tamil or Telugu - into five main Bollywood players.

The report said India’s cinema scene, where 4 billion tickets are sold annually, has always been big business. Since the government relaxed rules on banks and investors lending money to filmmakers, expansion has taken off both at home and abroad.

According to Price Waterhouse Coopers, the leading audit firm, domestic Indian film revenue would almost double from Rs 96 billion (1.14 billion pounds) in 2007 to Rs 176 billion in 2012. In Britain, Bollywod accounted for just under 2 per cent of box-office takings last year - 3 million pounds.