 "Ekta Kapoor: The drama queen")
Even as murmurs about Disney India's plans to abandon the Hindi film business grow louder, it now appears that that Shobhaa and Ektaa Kapoor-promoted Balaji Telefilms may be also be considering exiting the films business.
The company, which runs its film studio business under the brand Balaji Motion Pictures, is contemplating a change of tactics for the unit after recent controversies and failures, sources said.
Balaji's track record at the box office is peppered with some huge successes like ‘Dirty Picture’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in Mumbai’ but it has also, more recently, seen a spate of failures in the form of ‘Great Grand Masti’, ‘Kya Kool Hai Him 3’, and ‘Azhar’, the last one an eponymous biopic about India’s former cricket champion who became the face of the match-fixing scandal.
While the company had not responded at the time of publication, those familiar with the matter say that the company may not exit films business instantly, but has stopped greenlighting films. In 2014, after the failure of ‘Once Upon Time in Mumbai Dobara’ (2013) and 'Shaadi ke Side Effects' (2014), the company put pause to its film production slate to take stock of the strategy.
It has since got a new CEO - Samir Nair, formerly of Star India and Imagine, and has announced the launch of its digital streaming platform Alt Digital. Sources believe that along with TV production, which remains the focus of the business, the digital content creation and monetisation is expected to be at the core of the company's strategy.
