Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: The making of the domestic crossover

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Are we finally seeing the making of national film studios? Chennai Express' ode to Rajinikanth and Tamil cinema and Madras Cafe's hard look at the Tamil movement in Sri Lanka are obvious examples of a creative crossover of sorts. There are others that are not so obvious. Dhanush, one of the most talented Indian actors in a long time, is a superstar in Tamil Nadu. He was coaxed into doing a hardcore Hindi film set in Banaras, with the plot explaining his accent too. Raanjahanaa (2013) is somewhat regressive. It worked nevertheless. Last week's release Zanjeer, a remake of Amitabh Bachchan's 1973 classic, stars Ram Charan, a heart-throb in Andhra Pradesh. It has been produced by Reliance Entertainment. The studio also co-produced the box-office hit Singham (2011), which was first made in Tamil and then remade in Hindi. There are scores of such instances.

They point inexorably to one thing: that film studios are finally taking the issue of scale seriously.

Indian film studios are puny by any standard. At Rs 1,074 crore in March 2013, the biggest studio, Eros, is less than $200 million. The largest global studio, Sony Pictures, boasts a revenue of $8.7 billion. The whole claim that India is the world's largest film-producing country means nothing because, for more than three billion tickets sold and 1,000-odd movies released, the Indian film industry made just under Rs 12,000 crore. Hollywood made four times that number. Even after factoring in the difference in the sizes of the economies and purchasing power, we should be able to reach two times our current size if we simply worked at consolidating at the production and retail end.

The retail end is on a roll, thanks to multiplexes and single-screen digitisation. At the production end, most of the studios were busy getting a handle on Hindi, the largest segment in terms of revenue. Remember that the studios themselves are a product of the corporatisation that began in 2000. Most are just about five to seven years old. Now that they are comfortable with Hindi, many are tackling growth and expansion in the rest of the country.

What you see, therefore, is the groping for synergies - both creative and commercial - between Hindi and other cinemas. This could be in the form of strategies aimed at pulling people and stories from one market to the other or using a creative tack that improves the returns for a film from non-Hindi markets. Just before the release of Chennai Express, Siddharth Roy Kapur, managing director (studios) of Disney-UTV, said that the studio did not set out to make a domestic crossover. "It came from the creative for the film. Having said that, it will appeal in the south." Typically, the four southern states account for 8-15 per cent of a Hindi film's box-office collection. Chennai Express got from the South more than 18 per cent of the Rs 223 crore it grossed at the box office so far. That is a very good number for a Hindi film.

Mr Kapur is emphatic, however, that, for Disney-UTV expansion is about more regionalisation and not just "taking Hindi there and adding an accent. We want to do what Hollywood has done in India - localise by putting their stories and characters".

Two years ago, all five major studios in India - Eros, Disney-UTV (then UTV), Yash Raj, Viacom18 and Reliance - started investing in non-Hindi cinema. These include Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, Marathi and Bhojpuri films, among others. The idea was to "go national", as one studio head put it.

The making and releasing of films in other languages have three advantages.

One, it brings scale, not just at a national level, but also internationally. Indian films grossed Rs 760 crore ($138 million) at the international box office. But the potential is much greater, given that the audience for Indian cinema ranges from Brazilians and Peruvians who enjoy the song and dance to Singaporeans and Malaysians. This is besides the usual UK, US and West Asian ones. The potential audience for Indian cinema is estimated at more than two billion. This includes 22 million non-resident Indians and those who have a cultural affinity for Indian films. Many of the studios that set up distribution infrastructure abroad might find economies of scale in distributing other Indian-language films in the same markets.

Two, it improves profitability, since non-Hindi films cost roughly half what the average Hindi film does. Eventually, most studios hope to get 30-50 per cent of their top line from non-Hindi cinema.

The third advantage is the cross-pollination of ideas and people, as discussed earlier.

So even if Deepika Padukone's Tamil accent in Chennai Express grates, ignore it - in aid of a good cause: the building of a pan-Indian film studio.

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