Earlier, I had written an article related to Star Wars and its popularity in which I did focus on how Maldives entered into the wider lore of the intergalactic saga in the form of the series' first anthology movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Roughly twenty minutes of the movie's climax was in the Maldives, and the island nation was given the "face-lift" to transform the archipelagic nation's islands into Planet Scarif. The Maldivian segment of the Rogue One movie was shot across the islands of Gan and Baresdhoo of Laamu Atoll.
This whole story relates to a niche travel concept called Film Tourism. This is a specialized niche which involves visitors exploring locations and destinations which have appeared in popular films of television series; and thus, in turn the said locations increased in their popularity.
Film Tourism is considered as one of the fastest growing sectors in the tourism currently in terms of a global context while it had gained a notable footing back in the 90s.
The official beginning of Film Tourism can be credited to the British Tourism Association for becoming the first tourism agency to in fact capitalize on niche tourism segment by publishing a map of Great Britain with locations of prolific movies marked on it. This was done back in 1996 and since then Film Tourism has gained international recognition and popularity.
Countries with large-scale cinema industries have since targeted on boosting Film Tourism by promoting locations where popular movies were shot. For instance, countries such as USA with its respective film industry Hollywood and India with both its Bollywood and regional cinema are major destinations that are now active promoters of Film Tourism.
With the rise of international travel as a travel trend and with the age of digital entertainment streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime Video, international cinema has gradually gained widespread recognition. Several film industries, for example, the Spanish, Korean, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and even Turkish film industries have gained wider popularity and recognition across the world over. This had in turn created an environment in these countries to capitalize on Film Tourism respectively as well owing to popular movies or series originating from these countries.
One article had claimed that popular movies have the capacity to increase tourism to the film's location between 25 percent to 300 percent.
Looking into how cinema put an effect on tourism, it was analyzed that all filming locations of the Harry Potter movie franchise observed an increase in tourism by 50%. Perhaps there is no contesting against the data given how much of a global phenomenon the wizard-centric movie franchise has been.
The extremely popular, critically and commercially acclaimed Disney animation, Frozen drove tourism of Norway up by 37 percent since the story of the animated movie centered on the country. Mel Gibson starrer epic war drama Braveheart contributed towards the increase of tourism to Wallace Monument in Scotland by 300 percent.
The Tom Cruise-helmed espionage franchise's second outing; Mission Impossible 2 is credited with driving up the tourism of Sydney National Park by 200 percent due to the location being used in the movie. In addition to this, the epic historical war film Troy starring Brad Pitt alongside an ensemble cast that included the likes of Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom and Rose Byrne boosted the tourism of Canakkale of Turkey by 200 percent.
It had also been reported that one survey indicated 10 percent of respondents had picked a location to travel because those locations were based off of a popular or notable movie's setting.
As mentioned earlier, Maldives has entered into the realm of Hollywood with the country being used in a franchise that is considered as a cultural lexicon now. However, it is still not entirely certain whether the use of Maldives as a filming location in the Star Wars anthology movie inspired people to visit the country or not – that is with regards to tourism markets such as the Europe or Americas.
However, Bollywood has contributed towards boosting the popularity of Maldivian tourism since the past years have observed a visible surge in Indian celebrities holidaying in various resorts of the island nation.
Some major inclusion of Maldives in Bollywood movies includes Salman Khan starrer Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya (2005); the movie had a song centered around its protagonist and female lead filmed in the Maldives. Another notable Bollywood movie is Fight Club: Members Only (2006) produced by Salman Khan's younger sibling Sohail Khan in which he played one of the central characters; the song "Chhore ki Baatein" centered on actors Dino Morea and Amrita Arora was shot in the Maldives.
Recently the Akshay Kumar starrer, Rohit Shetty's Cop Universe's fourth entry Sooryavanshi (2021) had several scenes where the actors mentioned Maldives in their dialogues, which can be regarded as a sign of growing popularity of the country among Bollywood celebrities as well as the consumers of the film industry.
The inclusion of Maldives in Bollywood cinema could have been one of the reasons that has contributed towards many celebrities and their families holidaying in the country.
However, there is still no indication that the usage of Maldives in popular Bollywood movies acted directly towards the increase in tourists from India. Although there is no denying that India is currently the strongest tourism source market to the archipelago with over 286,000 tourists from the South Asian giant visiting the Maldives so far in 2021.
It cannot be said if or not Film Tourism is what is popular with Indian tourists or it is because correlated to the growing popularity of the country among celebrities.
For any place to become a popular tourist location, one integral element is marketing. Many of the global locations where prominent movies were shot in, had marketed these destinations and places by mentioning that movie that was filmed there.
Maldives had this shot back in 2016 with Rogue One, but due to elapse of time and the movie also entering into the past – it can be argued that the time of relevance to boost Film Tourism across Laamu Atoll where the movie was filmed, has run out since a research by Riley, Baker and Van Doren suggested that tourism spike can last between three to four years for the most popular of films.
Conclusively speaking, there may be several prospective opportunities for international movie productions to choose Maldives as a filming location for their projects and should such a situation manifests and it leads to the eventuality of a movie or a series becoming popular then Maldives can boost the niche tourism segment – for this, tourism and destination promoters will have to be vigil and timely.
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