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BOI: Can you start by introducing your team and the work they do?
Vijay Singh (VS): This team has been with the company from day one, and that says a lot. Rohit (Sharma) heads international sales. Vivek (Krishnani) heads marketing and distribution across Hollywood and Bollywood. Among those who are not here are Shriram (Krishnan), who is the CFO of the company. He is involved in all the key business decisions and also devotes time to the Tamil industry. Neerja (Narayanan) heads Development, as it is all about the ‘stories’. Kumar Sundaresan, heads National Distribution and we all recognise the importance of distribution in this market. Dina Dattani is our Legal Head and Parth Arora has recently joined us to head our Production
BOI: How does a product emerge at Fox Star? Where does it all begin?
VS: Our objective is to become one of the top three film studios in India. The good news is that over the last 12 months, we are already the third-largest company in terms of market share across Hollywood and Bollywood. Within Bollywood, we are in the top five studios in India, which is fantastic as,unlike our competitors, we set up in India less than five years back.
Our guiding philosophy is to ‘create exciting films that are financially prudent’. This,I believe is key for longevity in the film business – more so in India where the risk-reward ratio is skewed. So, there is clearly a sense of achievement for all of us at Fox Star Studios as we are one of the few studios that has been profitable!
We have a clear guiding strategy – as we want to be a significant player in the Indian market and to achieve that goal we have adopted a portfolio strategy across genres and scale of projects. At this stage, we are limiting ourselves to producing films in Hindi and Tamil. We also believe that the audience profile is changing and consumers are looking for differentiated content. They do want films with big stars as also differentiated content that can capture their imagination. With this insight, we do reach out to writers and directors who share a common vision with us. The objective is to identify projects that fulfil this insight and simultaneously are ‘financially prudent’. Development is a very important focus for us. it’s all about incubating good scripts, constantly looking out for good stories, or remake ideas be they from our vast Hollywood library or in Tamil or any other language.
Our aim is to do seven to eight Bollywood films a year and two to three Tamil films. More than number of films, it’s about creating products with a high level of differentiation and entertainment. This would make for strong underlying growth as far as the theatrical business is concerned.
BOI: While green-lighting a project, what kind of inputs do you take intoImage may be NSFW.
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account internally?
VS: It all starts with a great idea and whether it can be executed in a differentiated manner. The focus is to get it right at the script level and the rest must follow with equal amount of enthusiasm and due diligence. We worked along with Siddharth Anand, Sujoy Ghosh and Suresh Nair for over a year. Once we had a compelling script, we reached out to Hrithik (Roshan) and Katrina (Kaif) and we were of course thrilled that they loved the script. On the other hand, you have a director who shares your enthusiasm and has an incredible script and we get involved in his vision to make it a reality, as in the case of Jolly L.L.B… When Subhash (Kapoor) came to us – he came on the back of Phas Gaya Re Obama – it was the script that moved us. We believed in the script and made the film, and, as they say, the rest is history…
The third approach is the co-production model – when either party has an interesting idea, and both partners respect the complementary strengths that each party brings. In this instance, we typically get involved right from the start of the project, so that both the co-producers can actively engage in the definition of the key elements and working jointly, bring about synergy. Our very successful relationship with Vishesh Films is a great example of a successful co-production model.
Some people tend to believe that just because we are Fox Star Studios, we are not flexible – the above example clearly shows that we are flexible and willing to work with different business models.
Financial evaluation of a creative idea is equally key. Once we have shortlisted the script and have identified the actors, we do a serious financial evaluation – this is a financial modelling system that is a proprietary Fox tool which enables us evaluate how attractive the project is. Say, if we are evaluating Bullett Raja, we look at the financials of all of Saif Ali Khan and Tigmanshu Dhulia’s films and using the historical data, the model enables us to create different performance scenarios, which proves useful in deciding upon the level of risk one is willing to take on a project.
BOI: You started with My Name Is Khan (MNIK), which was the first IndianImage may be NSFW.
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film to have such a wide international release. Is it now easier to distribute your films or are there still challenges?
Rohit Sharma (RS): The traditional Indian Bollywood diaspora market in the UK, the US and the Middle East is about 70 per of the overall business. In South East Asian countries, it is 30 per cent. With MNIK, due to its content, we first targeted the Indian diaspora market first, and once we knew the film could travel beyond non-traditional markets, we did a shorter edit and targeted the Eastern markets in Europe, where Hindi films hadn’t been screened before. For example, it was dubbed in French, Italian, Spanish and Russian and released in Europe.
Also, due to the content of the film, markets like Indonesia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon opened up with MNIK. This was not an experiment; we were confident about the project.
After MNIK, many other studios have started going overseas, which means the market has indeed opened up. But it also depends on the genre of the film. So if you have a film which can travel, thanks to MNIK, we now have buyers who are interested in Hindi cinema. Before that, Indian studios were not confident of taking Indian cinema beyond traditional markets.
And this is also true for high concept driven projects. We released Stanley Ka Dabba in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. This was not a big film but it was the kind of film that would pass as world cinema in those markets. If you have the right product and distribution expertise, you can go beyond India.
VS: To add to the point Rohit made, I truly believe Fox Star has contributed to the industry as a whole through MNIK, which opened up new markets. Obviously, the next Bollywood film with the right content which goes overseas to these new markets will find it easier. This is just one example of how we push the envelope…