Last Christmas, The Indian Film Co. (TIFC) created history. It was one of the few companies where the party continued long after Santa had gone, leaving behind a world in the midst of an economic crisis.
Not so long before that, the film production house of the Network18 group, in its second year of existence, acquired the rights for a film that was adapted from a Tamil blockbuster—an action flick that was also a sweet Indian love story. Ghajini, in which Aamir Khan played the lead role and which was released on Christmas weekend, made Rs100 crore in its first week at the theatres. While many companies bled, the box office continued to jangle with the ticket sales of Ghajini through the year end.
On the cards: Bhargava says TIFC will begin work on at least three big-ticket films this year, including the Hindi remake of ‘The Italian Job’ to be directed by Abbas-Mastan. Jayachandran / Mint
“Saturation release” and “blanket release” weren’t terms put to regular, successful practice in India before TIFC made it all seem so easy. If
Munnabhai MBBS was a hit, it wasn’t because its producers had blocked all the screens of all the multiplexes in all the big cities with many, many screenings. That was a time when word-of-mouth and a few days of pre-release publicity could get people to the theatres.
TIFC released Singh is Kinng in August with an unheard of 1,400 prints. With Ghajini, it went a step further by sending out 1,500 prints across the world.
The maven behind these strategies is 42-year-old Sandeep Bhargava, the company’s soft-spoken, seemingly even-tempered CEO. We meet at the lounge café of Taj Lands End, his daily evening haunt, a few days earlier Bhargava had made yet another big announcement: TIFC and UK-based Bend It Films had entered into a strategic partnership to produce Gurinder Chadha’s next feature, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife.
In a light blue half-sleeve shirt and black trousers, the bespectacled head of TIFC looks every bit the corporate film producer— somewhere between a suited investment banker and a linen pyjama-clad ad creative director. It takes me by surprise when he says, early in our conversation, that he is not and has never been a movie buff and would never pay Rs200 to watch an “arty” movie in a theatre. The revelation comes off-hand, while discussing the merits of Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, a film he thinks “deserves the critical acclaim”.
But how does a man who doesn’t love movies sell them? “I have to keep track of every film that’s coming out every week, and what people like and don’t like about them. That sort of takes the romance and excitement out of actually watching them,” Bhargava says. He orders a glass of carrot juice and I settle for a cup of coffee. “This is my favourite drink here. They make a good one,” he says (carrot juice at 6pm makes perfect sense when he tells me that his passions, besides selling films, are swimming, tennis and squash).