Mumbai: Movies is where moolah is! And everyone wants in on it. TV18 promoter Raghav Bahl is the latest to be bitten by the film business bug. Bahl is floating a separate company to fulfill his big screen plans of a movie production boutique.
The company will be involved in producing and distributing movies. Although, at this juncture, it is not clear if the company may get into distributing international movies. However, the buzz in the broadcasting industry is that the movie production company will not be restricted at merely producing and distributing but is contemplating at looking into the movie acquisition market as well.
Former Sahara One Motion Pictures COO Sandeep Bhargava is tipped to spearhead the movie production house.
Bahl will have to compete with likes of the well entrenched long time players such as Yash Chopra’s Yash Raj Films, Subhash Ghai’s Mukta Arts, Sahara One Motion Pictures, Ronnie Screwvala’s UTV Motion Pictures, Ram Gopal Verma’s The Factory and Rakesh Roshan’s FilmKraft.
In his movie business ambitions, Bahl joins the likes of Subhash Chandra who earlier betted big on tinsel town with Gadar-Ek Prem Katha, live action-animated Bhagmati and Indo-French production One Dollar Curry.
TV18, at present manages four news channels; the English business news channel CNBC-TV18, the Hindi consumer news channel Awaaz, the English news channel CNN-IBN and the Hindi news channel Channel7.
