Last month, writers from Trinity Pictures India travelled to China to meet their counterparts at Peacock Mountain Culture and Media. Together, they put the finishing touches to the script of Kabir Khan’s travel drama,
The Zookeeper (working title).
The story of a small-town Indian zookeeper’s journey to China to find a Panda in order to save his zoo is tricky cross-cultural territory. “We want to get the nuances right,” says Trinity Pictures’ chief executive, Ajit Thakur. Trinity and Peacock are The Zookeeper’s co-producers and co-investors.
The Zookeeper, with an Indian actor and Chinese actress in the lead roles, is slated for a 2018 release. The film is one of 10 in Trinity’s pipeline.
Trinity, set up in March 2015, is the single biggest bet by the US$239-million Eros International, India’s largest film company. At about 65-70 releases a year, including Kabir Khan’s spectacularly successful Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Bajirao Mastani, Eros has always been what other studio heads call an “aggregator”.
Trinity is Eros’s attempt to get into the intellectual property (IP) game. The company will focus only on franchise films and only on franchises that can do Rs1,000 crore/US$150 million or more over three years and two films at least. That explains why Marvel’s David Maisel was brought onto the Eros board in 2014.
“Out of our total outlay of US$200-plus million in content investment for the year, around US$25 million to US$30 million will be towards Trinity. We will ramp up this number to around US$50 million in the coming two years,” says Jyoti Deshpande, Eros’s group CEO. Over time, Trinity’s four to six films a year should be “among the top 15 revenue generating films of the year for Eros as well as the industry,” she adds.
“Trinity is to Eros what Marvel is to Disney. Earlier we were funding storytelling. Now we are bringing storytelling and creation within Eros,” says Thakur.
One of the first things he did as CEO last year was bring in a team of writers (seven currently) to set up the Trinity Pictures Writers’ Room. The team developed the original story of The Zookeeper and the ...
Last month, writers from Trinity Pictures India travelled to China to meet their counterparts at Peacock Mountain Culture and Media. Together, they put the finishing touches to the script of Kabir Khan’s travel drama,
The Zookeeper (working title).
The story of a small-town Indian zookeeper’s journey to China to find a Panda in order to save his zoo is tricky cross-cultural territory. “We want to get the nuances right,” says Trinity Pictures’ chief executive, Ajit Thakur. Trinity and Peacock are The Zookeeper’s co-producers and co-investors.
The Zookeeper, with an Indian actor and Chinese actress in the lead roles, is slated for a 2018 release. The film is one of 10 in Trinity’s pipeline.
Trinity, set up in March 2015, is the single biggest bet by the US$239-million Eros International, India’s largest film company. At about 65-70 releases a year, including Kabir Khan’s spectacularly successful Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Bajirao Mastani, Eros has always been what other studio heads call an “aggregator”.
Trinity is Eros’s attempt to get into the intellectual property (IP) game. The company will focus only on franchise films and only on franchises that can do Rs1,000 crore/US$150 million or more over three years and two films at least. That explains why Marvel’s David Maisel was brought onto the Eros board in 2014.
“Out of our total outlay of US$200-plus million in content investment for the year, around US$25 million to US$30 million will be towards Trinity. We will ramp up this number to around US$50 million in the coming two years,” says Jyoti Deshpande, Eros’s group CEO. Over time, Trinity’s four to six films a year should be “among the top 15 revenue generating films of the year for Eros as well as the industry,” she adds.
“Trinity is to Eros what Marvel is to Disney. Earlier we were funding storytelling. Now we are bringing storytelling and creation within Eros,” says Thakur.
One of the first things he did as CEO last year was bring in a team of writers (seven currently) to set up the Trinity Pictures Writers’ Room. The team developed the original story of The Zookeeper and the other films Trinity is working on.
But why franchises? “Franchise films make for more discipline in storytelling. It works only if you invest in developing a character. The plots may run out but characters live on and the economic viability of franchises is very clear,” Thakur says.
Of the top 10 grossers in the last two years, six to seven have been franchises such as Avengers or The Hunger Games. The access to known characters in markets such as Korea or China, which along with the rest of the world bring in more than half of Hollywood’s revenues, makes the game more rewarding. It’s also cost effective. Since the characters are known, marketing costs drop.
Trinity’s slate looks interesting. There is Siddharth Anand’s cross-cultural romantic comedy, Love in Beijing (working title), being co-produced with China’s Huaxia Film Distribution Company. The pre-production on Amol Gupte’s kids’ adventure film, due for a 2017 release, is in full swing. A digital comic game and an animation series are in the works too. Prabhu Solomon’s trilingual tale of the friendship between man and elephant starts shooting by the end of this year.
“We want to look at genres that have not been explored fully in India. Gods and Kings, Mythologicals, kids (animation and live action), teens, supernatural,” Thakur says.
“Most of these genres lend themselves to franchises,” says Shailesh Kapoor, chief executive of Ormax Media, a research firms helping Trinity to test concepts and scripts.
India is a US$2-billion film market. Sultan, the biggest grosser of the year so far, has done about US$75 million in gross box-office collections. Most profitable Indian films do much less.
Where does the US$150 million over two films and three years fit in? “It is a statement of ambition,” says Thakur.
There is some skepticism about the Trinity game plan. “They are dealmakers signing cheques for acquisitions with a weak understanding of production,” says one analyst.
When Eros entered India, it threw in big advances in what Deshpande once described as the “land grab phase”. Now that the business is stable, the idea is to shift to become a content company with a healthy mix of its own and aggregated content.
Also a significant driver, say observers, is ErosNow. Eros’s OTT brand has 44 million registered users and original content is key to monetisation.
No one doubts Trinity is moving in the right direction on original production.
“It is absolutely the right thing to do,” says Viacom18 Motion Pictures’ chief operating officer, Ajit Andhare, adding: “All studios should own IP and should be involved in production”. – Vanita Kohli-Khandekar
Published on ContentAsia's print issue three 2016