Category: Hindi

MUMBAI: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has stalled the open offers from both Inox Leisure and Reliance ADAG companies for the acquisition of shares in Fame India. This has, however, not stopped Reliance from purchasing shares from the open market.

In its latest disclosure, Reliance MediaWorks said that along with two other group firms, Reliance Capital and Reliance Capital Partners, it has purchased another 0.21 per cent stake in Fame India, hiking the combined stake in the multiplex chain to 15.55 per cent.

The three ADAG companies acquired 72,627 shares. The acquisition of shares was made on 17 June.

The ADAG companies made the purchase at an average price of Rs 83.29 per share. The highest price paid was Rs 83.40, according to market information.
 

MUMBAI: The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has restrained the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce (KFCC) from taking any action directly or indirectly to prevent any exhibitor from showing the Hindi film Raavan and its Tamil version Raavanan in Karnataka.

Comments film producer and KFCC member Madhusudhan Reddy, “Expecting trouble from KFCC, Reliance Big Pictures had approached the court. The court, in turn, referred the matter to the CCI which passed a judgment in favour of Reliance Big Pictures. We will adhere to the CCI judgement.”

Both the Hindi and the Tamil version would now be playing in 24 theatres in Mysore circuit, in all multiplexes.

It may be recalled that the releases of Raavan and Raavanan had run into rough weather with the KFCC restricting the release of the movie in both the versions to only 24 screens in the old Mysore distribution area of Karantaka.

Reliance Big Pictures had contended that since the project was in two languages and with a different star cast, it should not be considered as a single but as two movies. And, hence, it should be permitted to release the films in 24 screens each.

“Raavan is a hugely mounted film and we would like the KFCC to liberalise its policy of restricting the release in a fixed number of theatres in Karnataka,” a letter from Big Pictures to KFCC had said.

But the KFCC turned down its contention and ordered it to keep it down to 12 for each language.

MUMBAI: After playing a Sikh character to perfection in Studio18‘s Singh Is King, Akshay Kumar will play a Marathi manoos in Cape of Good Films and Shree Ashtavinayak Cine Vision‘s Khatta Meetha.

Kumar plays Sachin Tichkule in the film that is largely a political satire on the deals between the construction lobby and municipal corporations in the country related through the life of Tichkule.

This slice of the film, much inspired by cartoonist RK Laxman, will get one thinking and have them laughing off their seat at the same time, believe the producers.

The film will see the debut of South‘s most sought-after actresses Trisha
 

MUMBAI: BigFlix Movie Rentals, the online and offline movie rental service under Reliance Big Entertainment, plans to have a total of 150 stores by March 2011.

The plan will have BigFlix.com deliver films at home to the people residing in Tier II cities like Jaipur, Vadodara, Surat, Lucknow, Nasik, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Patna, Nagpur and Kanpur.

In its endeavour, the company will engage local logistic partners to deliver movies at home to the masses in the respective cities.

It has 10 franchise stores in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Chandigarh, Faridabad and Panipat. The stores will start functioning once they have their respective logistics partners finalised for these cities.

The rental company has a total retail presence of 60 stores and an access to about 21,000 titles in 13 Indian languages.

The company‘s franchise business will have two models, namely, ‘store‘ franchise and ‘master‘ franchise. While the store franchise will be where an interested party can become the franchise of a single store in any specific city, the master franchise will be where interested party can opt for the franchise of a set number of stores for a specific geographic location.

Speaking on the franchise plan, BigFlix.com chief lead- franchise operations Puneet Sachdeva said, “We are all geared up with the launch of our new expansion plans with the franchise route. While we will focus on the brand building and content acquisition aspects meeting with the specific requirements of the denizens residing in these cities, our franchisees will handle all the logistics and operations of the business.”

“Considering that even today we see 75 to 80 per cent of our registrations coming in from the offline route, and a constant response in terms of enquiries/ registrations on our website from these cities for our film service, we are confident that the franchise model will be the most feasible path at this stage,” added Sachdeva.

Currently, BigFlix.com has a customer base of 80,000 customers and with the franchise foray, it aims to reach a target of 1, 50, 000 customers by March 2011.
 

MUMBAI: As part of a creative partnership, Reliance Big Entertainment, the entertainment arm of Indian conglomerate Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG), and Brad Pitt‘s production company Plan B Entertainment have acquired the distribution rights of Tom Rachman‘s novel adaptation The Imperfectionists. 

The film centers on the quirky, maddening, endearing people who write and read an international newspaper based in Rome: from the obituary reporter who will do anything to avoid work, to the young freelancer who is manipulated by an egocentric war correspondent, to the dog-obsessed publisher who seems less interested in his struggling newspaper than in his magnificent basset hound.

Commenting on the acquisition, Reliance Big Entertainment chairman Amit Khanna said, ‘”The Imperfectionists is a compliment to our slate with Plan B Entertainment. It will make a commercial and extremely relevant film which will play well to an international audience.”

Reliance Big Entertainment first introduced its development/ production financing deal termed as Creative Partnership with Plan B Entertainment at the Cannes Film Festival 2008.

MUMBAI: Walkwater Media and UTV Motion Pictures‘ Raajneeti is among the few films that have been able to boast of their vigour at the box-office this year.

The film‘s 10 day gross box office collections in India are Rs 945 million. Overseas too, Raajneeti has had a good run at the box office with its 10 day collections at Rs 160 million across close to 300 screens.

In the USA, the movie has done business of $1,287,416 while in the UK, the collections stand at $588,305 and in the Gulf it is $726,081.

MUMBAI: Zee Talkies‘ Natarang will be the opening film at the 28th Munich International Film Festival, to be held from 25 June to 3 July.

The film had earlier won several prestigious awards like the best film award at the Pune International Film Festival.

Says Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. COO Nitin Vaidya, “Natarang has done an awesome business and achieved great appreciation from nationwide critics. Now Zee Talkies is really proud for getting international recognition through this festival and augurs well for us as our film will get a great applause from the worldwide audiences. We are happy that our faith in this project has been justified.”

This year the Munich film festival will be holding the premieres of more than 200 German films besides screening films from 48 countries.

The festival is Germany‘s leading film festival that attracts over 65,000 film lovers every year and as many as 600 members of the international press and over 1000 film-related professionals.

MUMBAI: Reliance Big Pictures and Madras Talkies‘ upcoming film Raavan will release simultaneously on 18 June in approximately 2200 screens worldwide.

The Hindi version Raavan will release in 1250 screens in India and in 325 screens overseas across 35 countries including US, Canada, UK, UAE, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, South Africa, Netherlands, France, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India.

The Tamil version Ravanan will release in 225 screens in the country including Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka and also in Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune, Nasik, Surat, Baroda and Kolkata with English subtitles. 

Besides, it will release in 150 screens overseas in Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, US, UK, Middle East Asia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

The Telugu dubbed version Villian will release in 215 screens in Andhra Pradesh and in addition in 25 screens in US, Australia and New Zealand.

Says Reliance Big Pictures CEO Sanjeev Lamba, “Reliance Big Pictures is proud to partner with Madras Talkies and present Raavan in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu for audiences worldwide. We hope that the film‘s success is repeated and further strengthened with the highly-anticipated Hindi debut of Vikram.”
 

NEW DELHI: The experimental ‘Mr Singh Mrs Mehta’, written and directed by Pravesh Bhardwaj, is to be strategically released on 25 June at just around 20 screens and will later be taken to other parts of the country.

Based in London, the film stars Prashant Narayanan with British-Indian stars Aruna Shields, Lucy Hassan and Naved Aslam. It is produced by Tutu Sharma and Manu S Kumaran.

The film is a mature story of adultery, attempting to show how circumstances are often responsible for what married couples do. When Ashwin Mehta and Neera Singh find that their spouses are having an affair, they find comfort in their growing friendship even as they resolve not to be like their unfaithful mates.

Bhardwaj said he was inspired by agony aunt columns in newspapers to conceive this story. While the film had only four main characters, painting assumes an important role in the second half.

Bhardwaj, who had earlier made the ‘Shaheen’ serial for television, denied that the film had been made with non-resident Indians in mind and stressed that the choice of London was not for this reason.

He denied any problems with the Central Board of Film Certification which had cleared the film with an ‘Adults only’ certificate. However, he admitted that the process of censorship had taken a long time, primarily because of some steamy scenes between Narayanan and Shields.

Narayanan in an interview later denied any titillating scenes and said that kissing scenes were very normal in films today.

Stating that the film was shot in Wales, he said he was a director’s actor and it was the heroines who had made him feel comfortable on the sets.

Asked why he had acted in a very small number of films, he said an actor has to be meticulous. He had recently acted in an international production ‘Shadows of Time’ and had also acted in films like ‘White Elephant’, and ‘Waisa bhi hota hai’.

He also said he was a writer and was presently writing the scripts for some films including one related to badminton – for which he had attained national championship status – and had his own band of musicians. In fact, he often made suggestions to music directors in all his films.
 

NEW DELHI: ‘Krantiveer – A Revolution’, touted as a sequel to the Nana Patekar-Dimple Kapadia starrer ‘Krantiveer’, will be released all over the country at 450 to 500 screens on 25 June.

Starring Sameer Aftab, Jahan Bloch, Harsh Rajput, and Aditya Singh Rajput, with Farida Jalal, Govind Namdeo and Aman Verma, the film has been directed by Mehul Kumar.

Kumar told indiantelevision.com that the film was a sequel in the sense that the main protagonist is the daughter of the role enacted by Nana Patekar in the 1994 film.

The message of the film was very clear: “We achieved independence at midnight. But we are still awaiting the morning of freedom from corruption and terror.”

There was, therefore, a need for a new revolution, to rouse the people to speak out as the protagonists of his film do.

Asked if he had any problems with a new star cast, he said it was in fact easy to direct these youngsters as they had no tantrums and were eager to learn.