AB Corp, UTV to co-produce films

Superstar Amitabh Bachchan has announced a partnership between his company AB Corp and Ronnie Screwvala's United TeleVision for various ventures in the entertainment sector.

"We have signed an MoU with UTV. We are looking at co-production in films, television programmes and other ventures," Bachchan said in Amsterdam.

Pointing out that Indian film industry had changed over the years, Big B said this was the era of co-production and "joining hands" was necessary for survival. "Budgets are going to rise and no single entity is going to have the capacity to produce a film by itself," he said.

"Let's say you have a Rs 20 crore (Rs 200 million) film. If you co-produce it, you may run the risk of losing Rs 10 crore (Rs 100 million) but you get a product worth Rs 20 crore," he said.

Terming Indian films as a frontier waiting to be conquered by US companies, Bachchan said the desi film industry needs to be corporatised to be ready for this invasion of sorts.

"We have learned from the failure of ABCL. Perhaps, it was too ambitious and possibly arrogant. But now we won't repeat the mistakes that we made earlier. We just want to hold hands and move together," he said.

Bachchan said that a huge amount of professionalism had crept into the film industry today.

"Indian cinema today has adopted the corporate way of thinking. This bodes really well for it. I came from an era of filmmaking when there was no such thing as professionalism," he said.

Bachchan, however, declined to give details about the new projects to be co-produced under the new partnership venture. "Things are still in the pipeline. We will be announcing them later on", he said.

Ronnie Screwvala, CEO of UTV, announced that it had bagged the international distribution rights of the AB Corp production 'Viruddh.'

"The bilingual film is ready for release next month. Mahesh Manjrekar is the director of the film, which stars Amitabh, Sharmila Tagore, Sanjay Dutt, John Abraham and MTV veejay Anusha. It will be released as 'Versus' in English."

UTV is also collaborating with Fox Searchlight to produce Mira Nair's 'The Namesake', which is based on Pultizer-winner Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel.

"We want to take it to Cannes 2006. We just finished shooting the film in New York, Kolkata and Agra and the release date is set sometime around December 2005," Screwvala said.