India’s Jio Studios Chief Reveals Slate, Strategy: ‘We’ve Hit a Purple Patch, Like Tendulkar Hitting Centuries’ (EXCLUSIVE)
03.04.2024 - 03:03
/ variety.com
Naman Ramachandran Jio Studios, the content arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), is on a roll with several box office hits in a row. Almost exactly a year ago, Jio Studios had launched a slate of 100 new films and TV shows. Those efforts have now come to fruition.
2023 saw Marathi-language “Baipan Bhaari Deva” and “Jhimma 2,” Bollywood films, Shah Rukh Khan’s “Dunki” and Vicky Kaushal’s “Zara Hatke Zara Bachke,” and Mithun Chakraborty-starring Bengali-language film “Kabuliwala” become major hits. 2024 has already delivered Bollywood hits “Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya,” “Article 370” and “Shaitaan,” with Kiran Rao’s 2023 Toronto-playing feminist romp “Laapata Ladies” also scoring in its theatrical release. “We are the only studio to have seven hits in a row.
We hit a purple patch, like how [cricket GOAT Sachin] Tendulkar was hitting his centuries,” Jyoti Deshpande, president, media and content business, RIL, told Variety. “We’ve always been champions of stories, and tried to do genre-breaking stuff, the ultimate goal being stories from India that can be taken to the world. And, one of the things that we underlined in April [2023], was that we must make regional films to scale.
When we say regional, typically, it’s only the Telugu and Tamil [language films] that make a little bit of noise. The other regionals are forgotten heroes. We’ve been consciously investing in regional cinema as well for theaters, not just tokenism.” Regional is Indian shorthand for films that are not made in the Hindi-language Bollywood industry.
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