Washington, May 30: After Tata’s Jaguar Land Rover, Mahindra Tractors and the iconic Taj Boston, America’s resistance to India’s Bollywood is being steadily broken down from coast to coast here.

Hrithik Roshan’s new film, Kites, this fortnight shot into the top 10 list at the North American box office, the first Bollywood film to turn acclaim into hard cash on an opening weekend here.

The film, which grossed just under one million dollars, continues to be in the tenth place behind How to Train Your Dragon.

Although Bollywood productions such as Lagaan and My Name Is Khan have previously been reviewed here, such reviews have been confined to the ethnic press or publications such as The New York Times and catering to what the arch-conservative, Sarah Palin type of “tea party”activists would refer to as latte-drinking, Prius-driving, arugula-eating elitist readership which loves to patronise foreign films.

Mainstream America had so far steadfastly remained immune to Bollywood.

Kites, on the contrary, has had the largest number of reviews in the broad American media for any Bollywood film on its opening day.

Based on the weighted average of 19 such reviews, “Tomatometer”, a yardstick for the film industry and moviegoers here of how critics rate a film, has given Kites a spectacular 89 per cent positive rating.

Reviewers here have noted that simultaneously, Kites opened at an even higher number five slot at the box office in Britain. Bollywood may have finally gone global like the Tatas and the Mahindras, if these ratings on both sides of the Atlantic mean anything.

Two days ago, Kites - The Remix an edited version of the original, two hour and 10 minute film was released in theatres here to specifically appeal to the non-ethnic audience in North America who are used to shorter movies. The edited version has cut viewing time to 90 minutes.

This is the first time a Bollywood movie has been remixed and edited with a view to appealing to a wider North American audience. While the original was directed by Anurag Basu, the remixed version is being marketed here as a Brett Ratner film.

Ratner is known widely in North America as the director responsible for the Hollywood success of Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong actor who popularised kung-fu in the West.

Kites - The Remix has retained all the dances and gyrations that Bollywood is famous for in the West. Ratner’s hope is that those will draw a new crowd here to Hindi films just as Asian martial arts made Jackie Chan movies box office success earlier.

The Washington Post reviewed the remix and wrote that it is a “compelling romantic saga that goes beyond barriers, boundaries and cultures. Officially billed as ‘A Brett Ratner Presentation,’ Ratner’s version of Kites, as its title suggests, is a true remix, in that it is the same film played to a different rhythm running at a swift 90 minutes.'

It is a reflection of the marketing effort here for this Bollywood film that both the original and edited versions of the film are simultaneously being screened in some theatres giving movie-goers a choice.

Interestingly, ethnic and mainstream American audience and reviewers appear to assess Kites, very differently.

Jeannette Catsoulis who reviewed the unedited version for The New York Times wrote: “On the whole, American audiences remain stubbornly immune to the charms of the Bollywood romance, a fact that Kites is determined to change.

“Directed by Anurag Basu with a finger in every genre jar, Kites caroms from car chase to shootout, from rain dancing to bank robbing with unflagging energy. It is all completely loony, but the stunts are impressive, the photography crisp and the leads so adorably besotted that audiences might as well check their cynicism at the door.”

Kevin Thomas wrote in Los Angeles Times that “the film is free of both subtlety and irony, and it demands of its charismatic stars, Hrithik Roshan and Barbara Mori, that they act their hearts out with the utmost sincerity. The result is an exhilarating escapist entertainment that plays out like a violent and floridly poetic allegory.”

Aseem Chhabra, a respected ethnic Indian film critic based in New York wrote in a tweet and later expanded his view of Kites : “The film may have opened in the top 10 in North America — but then it was a weak weekend for movies. In reality Kites grossed less than one million dollars in over 200 theaters in North America. As compared to that, My Name is Khan, 3 Idiots and even K3G made over one million dollars in half the number of theaters. Not a good sign for a film that was supposed to crossover to the West.'

Another Indian wrote on a listserv of the South Asian Journalists’ Association of North America that Kites is “the weirdest Bollywood movie I have seen. Bollywood is really going ‘global’! I think I am rightly switching over to regional cinema like Marathi and Bengali cinema. The flavour is at least more Indian than this sold out Bollywood crap.”