Gone are the days when unofficial remakes of foreign language films were rampant in India. Bollywood is no longer in a mood to merely cut, copy and paste. A fear of lawsuits and social media trolls is prompting the industry to go the extra mile, search for the original filmmakers and get the official remake rights. So if Fox Star Studios is officially remaking the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz starrer ‘Knight & Day’ as ‘Bang Bang’ toplining Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif, then the award-winning British-Filipino flick ‘Metro Manila’ will get an Indian touch by the Shahid team of Hansal Mehta and Rajkummar Rao in ‘City Lights’. The rights of European hits ‘Love Me If You Dare’, ‘The Intouchables’ and ‘Priceless’ have also been signed, sealed and delivered for a Bollywood makeover. The latest buzz is that Dostana director Tarun Mansukhani has tapped Sidharth Malhotra and Anushka Sharma for the Priceless remake. Lionsgate and Endemol India have announced a co-production of the Hindi version of the 2011 sports drama Warrior, which starred Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton. Rohan Sippy, the director of Nautanki Saala!, which was the remake of French comedy Après Vous, feels that the reason Bollywood veered towards unofficial remakes chiefly because there were no means to acquire the rights. “Now the option exists. With increasing interaction with the outside world, there are more resources powered by the assumption of us being more corporate has driven our business into a more professional space,” he says. Not only that, most of the Hollywood studios are actively taking part in making movies for the Indian audience. To a great extent, the entry of foreign studios such as Disney, Fox and Warner Brothers in India has helped to bring this renaissance in Indian filmmaking process. Now, buying rights is not so difficult. Big studios with a huge legacy of successful films also bring along a bank, so content sharing gets a boost. “This is a major change from the time when there wasn’t really an option of buying. We are talking about a time when internet or other means of communication were not so evolved. Even if someone wanted to buy the rights, they hardly knew how to go about it. Now when studios approach a director to work with them, they also offer their bank of films,” says Rajat Arora, writer of The Dirty Picture. Disney India currently has the remakes of You Again, Love Me If You Dare and the Korean hit My Girlfriend is An Agent, among others, at different stages of development. “International studios and the access to all their films have really changed the game. We ourselves get the rights and make the necessary moves. Now studios make the same film in different languages,” says Amar Butala, creative director, Studios–Disney India. indianexpress/article/entertainment/play/everything-official-about-it/
Posted on: Thu, 08 May 2014 09:18:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015