Bollywood has met Hollywood at the Cannes Film Festival, with George Clooney, Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt signing rupee-spinning deals for big movie collaborations.

India produces more films than any other country, and sells more than four billion cinema tickets a year, far more than in America. Now one of its biggest companies is to become a significant Hollywood player, it was announced yesterday in Cannes.

Reliance Big Entertainment, part of a $100 billion (£50 billion) Indian conglomerate, is to invest in development funds for eight production companies owned by Alist stars: they include Nicolas Cage’s Saturn Productions, Jim Carrey’s JC 23 Entertainment, Clooney’s Smokehouse Productions, Hanks’s Playtone Productions and Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.

The Indian company, owned by Anil Ambani, ranked the world’s sixth-richest man in the Forbes list, is offering an initial $1 billion investment in Hollywood. It is a vital injection of cash for the US studios at a time when equity financing has dried up with the credit crunch. It also offers the Americans a foothold in India.

Amit Khanna, Reliance’s chairman, said: “Reliance Entertainment has a dominant position in India but, when it comes to motion pictures, it has been obvious that we need to extend our footprint to Hollywood . . .

“Bollywood is somehow personified by song and dance and Hollywood by sex and violence, and there is this idea that neither can meet. We don’t believe this is true.”

The film-makers Chris Columbus and Jay Roach have also signed up with Reliance Big Entertainment.

“With this deal, we hope to develop up to 30 scripts, of which hopefully, ten will go into production,” Mr Khanna said. “The value of this slate of films will be worth a billion dollars. The films will be made in the next two years under different genres and will have a range of budgets.”

But Kishore Lulla, chairman of Eros International, a leading Indian studio with a catalogue of 2,000 films, said that Hollywood was too risky.

“It is a dangerous area to go in,” he said. “I do not want to play that volatile game. I am sitting on a goldmine market, which is India. There will be major growth in India in the next five years, whereas Hollywood growth has plateaued out in the last five years.”

Mr Lulla’s company is making 35 films this year alone, including one with Aishwarya Rai, the Bollywood actress, who has also been in Cannes this week.

The agreement was signed as the Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas is preparing to shoot what is believed to be the first American co-production filmed in India.

Racing the Monsoon, a sequel to Romancing the Stone, will be about a diamond robbery in India. It will also star Catherine Zeta-Jones, Douglas’s wife, and Matt Damon.

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