The Lunchbox: Simple fare proves the right recipe for global box-office success

The Irrfan Khan film The Lunchbox has created history by becoming Bollywood's biggest grosser in a non-traditional foreign market. The poignant but simple love story, produced by Dar Motion Pictures, has raked in Rs 27.22 crore in France alone - that's nearly as much as its gross collection in the domestic market and a number big Indian movies hope to get in the traditional makets like the US, the UK or West Asia, where there is a high demand for Hindi films. The record was earlier held by 3 Idiots, which had made Rs 15 crore in Hong Kong.

Made with a small budget of Rs 10 crore, The Lunchbox is rewriting the history of Bollywood film in more ways than one. It is also the first to earn from foreign markets more than double its collections in India - a cool Rs 56.32 crore, compared with Rs 28.6 crore in the domestic market. The figures for foreign collections will only go up as the movie is released in the UK, Australia and New Zealand on April 11.

Besides, France is not the only European country where the movie has struck a chord. Elsewhere in the continent, The Lunchbox collected Rs 11.29 crore in Germany, a market not seen as a great market for Indian films, and Rs 4.36 crore in Switzerland. According to experts, the standing ovation the movie received at the Cannes Film Festival last year and the word-and-mouth publicity it led to could have been responsible for the success in Europe. The versions released in these markets were subtitled in local languages.

So far as the traditional good markets for Indian films are concerned, The Lunchbox's performance was average in the US (Rs 6.64 crore), while it received a rather tepid response in the UAE (Rs 0.5 crore).

The Aamir Khan hit 3 Idiots had collected a combined Rs 35 crore from the non-traditional Southeast Asian market (Hong Kong, South Korea, China and Japan). The Lunchbox, in comparison, raked in a combined Rs 47.46 crore from five European countries of France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.

According to film critic and trade analyst Taran Adarsh, it is a clear indication that powerful content can drive business globally. "It is a victory for content. If you see, there is no major star in the film. While Irrfan has some visibility in certain foreign markets like US and UK, female lead Nimrit is a newcomer even for the Indian audiences. For a movie to do so well, its content has to catch foreign audience's attention."

Dar Motion Pictures' producer, Vivek Rangachari, points out that Irrfan Khan is quite a known face in the Hollywood Indie film circuit. But he is also quick to agree that the film's content has been the main reason for its success. "I feel the success of this film is due to the global nature of the subject and its beautiful treatment. One of the learnings is that there is a large non-diaspora market ready to accept honest good Indian content. As they say, the more local the content, the more global its appeal."

However, powerful content is only half the battle won. Rangachari and his team knew they needed to have a strong distribution plan to make the most of their foreign outing. They adopted the platform-release strategy, where one starts off small with a few screens in select cities and then scales up or down based on feedback. The three-screen release in the US garnered a collection of an average $17,000 per screen. Encouraged by this, the producers took the movie to more screens across the country.

Rangachari adds: "Sony Picture Classics, our North American distributor, is very strong in this space and had planned the release very carefully, aiming at a high impact and return on investment. In other global markets, it indeed was a conscious decision to partner with different distributors/distribution agencies. These distributors are leaders in their own region; the key criterion here was that they would be the best suited to ensure an optimal release for the film. Another factor that necessitated this was our clear focus that we wanted The Lunchbox to transcend from being a foreign language to mainstream release in as many markets as possible."

In India, the film was distributed by Disney UTV Studios. It was also one of the hopefuls as India's official entry to the Oscars last year, but lost out to The Good Road.