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No one would have imagined in their wildest dream that an international film studio will launch its Indian operations with a quirky comedy like 'Quick Gun Murugun'. Though its first film flopped, Fox Star Studios, the joint venture between Rupert Murdoch's two companies - 20th Century Fox and STAR - is now one of the seven major film studios in India. And it has an ambitious aim of being among the top three in the next three years.
"We had a clear strategy before we entered the market. We recognised that Hollywood will be a big priority and we must invest behind that. At the same time, if you want to stay in business in India, you must get into local content. We also felt that we must put the building blocks in place before we start scaling up. People termed us a slow starter, but that was only part of the strategy," says Vijay Singh, CEO at Fox Star Studio.
Quick Gun Murugun, Singh adds, was part of a learning process. Fox later got associated with mid-level films like Dum Maaro Dum and Force, and big budget films like My Name is Khan too, to get scale. "The intent was to get our hands dirty, understand the business dynamics and then scale up," Singh said.
While there was no competition from international counterparts, Indian studios including Yash Raj Films, UTV Motion Pictures, Viacom18 Motion Pictures, and Eros etc brought out multiple movies in a year, making Fox Star a slow starter. But Singh argues that in the last four years, the company has done credible work, which was commercially sensible, too.
He has walked the talk, delivering six hits in a row. Starting with the re-release of Titanic and Ice Age that became the biggest animation films in India, the company released Jannat 2, Bol Bachchan, Raaz 3, Life of Pi and recently Jolly LLB. However, its Matru Ki Bijli ka Mandola flopped while Murder 3 got mixed reviews.
Looking ahead, three years from now, Fox Star is looking to do seven-eight Bollywood projects and around three to four Tamil projects.
The company first invested in building national distribution to have a direct relationship with all the exhibitors. It also tried to expand the Hollywood market as the company releases around 15 Hollywood movies every year. Singh says Fox Star has the finest national theatrical distribution in the country and will give top priroty to building a script bank.
Going forward, the company will have a mix of category A+ projects, category A projects and category B projects. "We are not looking to do category C projects unless they come with a special film like Stanley ka Dabba. We felt that the film had a relevant emotion and story that needed to be told. It's all about making sure that the portfolio is commercially sensible and that's what we are trying to construct," says Singh.
"We are moving to actually constructing projects, writing scripts and building up the true spirit of partnership. We have announced a project with Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif. It's basically a very contemporary, cool, romantic, action film inspired by the Tom Cruise' film Knight and Day that we have done in Hollywood. We have only taken the central idea as at the end of the day we know that the emotion needs to be very Bollywood," he added.
However, Singh feels that while there are opportunities, the business model of Bollywood, even today, is wrong and needs to get corrected. "You cannot be in a situation where the risk sits with the studio and the reward is with the actors and the producers. The reward to risk ratio in the business needs to get more balanced. The entire focus on cost of production needs to increase," he said.
Singh is bullish on future also because revenue from theatrical as well as cable and satellite rights is growing.
However, not everybody is as bullish. Though Fox Star has made its name in the Indian film market, many studios still believe that it is still a step behind the top six players. "They are late and have not picked up fast. They are more associated with Hollywood films and are not remembered for Bollywood projects," a promoter of a film studio says. But Singh obviously has other ideas.
