Reliance Big ties up with Tom Hanks' company

Reliance Big Entertainment (RBE), the flagship media and entertainment arm of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, today announced a joint venture with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone. RBE with Playtone will create Electric City – a multi-platform digital experience covering a multi-episode animated internet series, online social game and mobile application.

Conceived and written by Tom Hanks,it will offer a view of the future of civilisation, presented through the lens of provocative themes such as energy consumption, freedom of information, crime and punishment. Electric City is being specifically designed as a multi-platform, multi-screen unified digital experience. A social game, a mobile game, webisodes and mobisodes will be interlinked. The storyline lends itself to a multi-player browser game application for social networking sites and mobile devices.

This deal with Playtone is another major project for Reliance Big in Hollywood, like the one with Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider for the formation of DreamWorks Studios. Reliance Big also has development deals with the firms of Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.

Zapak, the gaming arm of RBE, will spearhead and manage the whole project. It has over seven million registered gamers. It also owns the largest chain of dedicated gaming cafes in the country, as many as 100, in more than 40 cities.