The Fox is in Bollywood
AP reports that Twentieth Century Fox established an Asian unit specializing in local productions, starting with India. Fox STAR Studios will start out making Bollywood films in Hindi as well in other regional Indian dialects. Vijay Singh, the president of strategy and operations mentions that Fox STAR will be “producing not only traditional Bollywood films but also innovating and targeting emerging genres” – So what does all this mean to the movie fan? More choices, wide range of subjects, quality cinema… or nothing much really? You tell…
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
i dont think “more choices” and “quality cinema” is going to come in the near future, the only movies they’ll be interested in producing is gonna be films like saawariya and chandni chowk to china, i doubt they have any intention to uplift the standards of indian cinema/ film market rather than just cashing in on the market that is already there.
corporate life is all about bottom lines and profit margins , forget about quality cinema……..
The industry getting an industry status was heralded as a major step towards improving the quality of cinema. But beyond corporate biggies getting into the act and signing multi-movie deals with actors and directors, it hasn’t done much more.
Not that quality of films hasn’t improved. Technically, today’s films are far ahead of what we saw in the 90’s or even the early part of this century. Filmmakers are picking up brave subjects to base their films on. There’s a lot of meaningful experimentation going on too.
But has all this happened due to the corporate money pouring in? I don’t think so. Take any big banner movie. Except for the gloss factor increasing by leaps and bounds, there’s not much to differentiate between what’s being dished out today and what was being dished out in the past. Surprisingly, it’s the smaller names who have displayed better promise in terms of overall cinematic quality. Films like KKG, M-SFU, Bheja Fry, WBHH-P2 etc. immediately spring to mind. The only notable name from a big banner in terms of freshness of premise, plot, direction etc. would be Chak De… which, though a decent film, doesn’t hold a candle to the other names mentioned here. And yeah…it was a collage of bits and pieces from hollywood sports movies.
I’m still waiting for a good effort to come from a big banner. Only then will this corporatisation translate into better quality of cinema.