Shemaroo eyes merchandising revenues

Shemaroo Entertainment, one of the leaders in the home entertainment space, is going to invest Rs 80-100 crore over the next one year in its various projects. These include exploration of several merchandising options for its animation as well as mainstream movies.

"Since our film production and distribution arm is only a year old, we are looking at various merchandising options to drive revenues. Merchandising is expected to be especially useful for animation movies," informed Roshni Sen, assistant vice-president "� marketing, Shemaroo Entertainment.

Shemaroo Film's first animation movie - 'Ghatothkach "� Master of Magic' "� was the first animation feature film from India to be aggressively promoted at a world stage like Cannes Film Festival pre-release.

"For Ghatothkach and other animation movies that we would come up with, we would essentially look at merchandise like toys for children," said Sen.

Other options, for both Shemaroo animation and mainstream movies could be caps, apparels, mousepad, and calendar, besides DVDs and VCDs.

Merchandising also helps to position an animation or a mainstream movie as a quality product, and not just another Indian film, said Sen.

In the mainstream space, Shemaroo is bullish on producing regional language movies and is looking at tying up with various movie directors.

Shemaroo Films entered the regional category last year with a Marathi movie and this year would be looking at Bengali and Punjabi movies as well.

Its first Marathi venture in the regional category - Maaza Nawra Tuji Baiko - a comical love story, was released last year in more than 65 theatres all over Maharashtra, and collected Rs 30 lakhs in the opening week itself.

Shemaroo is also looking at a worldwide distribution of its regional language movies. It is also talking to various telecom service providers for ringtone downloades of songs from its regional language movies.

The company's first Bengali venture, Anuranan, scheduled for release on July 6 this year with close to 10 prints in all of Kolkata, is 30 per cent in English and would use subtitles for the rest, said Sen.

Shemaroo has also tied-up with Inox Movies so that it can promote the regional language movies on a national level.