In a Galatta Plus roundtable, Karan Johar talked about the challenges of promoting and releasing an independent film in the present climate
Edited excerpts:
Making an indie film with good content but featuring unknown faces has become much more difficult than it used to be in today’s climate, even for producers like Karan Johar, who points out the various factors that hinder their selling. “You get the least amount for the satellite rights. And digital platforms are being very discerning on what they are taking or not because they’ve put in a lot of their funds in the pandemic years and now that the numbers are high for certain kinds of A-list tentpole films, they’re unable. So they’re asking you to release the film theatrically first but it’s difficult to release certain films that are good and high on content, but they get a token 200/500-print release and people are not advertising them properly and you don’t know when it comes and goes.”
Karan cites the example of Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill and how he and his co-producers such as Guneet Monga took a chance on it because they were bowled over by the content and the filmmaker’s conviction. “It’s an expensive action film. We had a Korean crew and we spent a huge amount of money on the film. It’s a genre film, based entirely on a moving train. We took a chance by going to TIFF with it, and because it was well-reviewed, we managed to sell it to Lionsgate UK and USA.”
The experience on the film, says Karan, helped him understand what indie cinema is and their international business where the focus is more on the content, not who is backing it or the name of the production house. “I might be Dharma Productions here but I’m nobody over there. I learned a lot through Guneet about how things work in that regard. Some of us who have studios have to take chances with certain genres we know can break through. Sometimes it takes very long to build a film, say, through the festivals and the available pipelines. You just have to put your might behind films that are not tentpole films.”
Karan recalls the time he backed Ritesh Batra’s Lunchbox, calling it ”one of the first indie films that did a big theatrical number” and that such films require aggressive marketing. “Someone has to put in all their might, to make sure a platform buys it; to package it such that it gets a bigger, wider release. It isn’t easy but not impossible. “
Watch the full conversation at:
