Indian Company Tries to Grab 200 U.S. Movie Theaters
India West, News Report, Lisa Tsering, Posted: Apr 28, 2008
Adlabs Films, a subsidiary of leading Indian entertainment company Reliance Entertainment, is making a grab for American audiences with the acquisition of more than 200 cinemas in 28 U.S. cities.
The new theater chain will likely be branded as Big Cinemas and will program a mix of Hindi, South Indian, and first-run and second-run Hollywood movies.
It has already begun a quiet rollout: the company's first West Coast property to open is the Norwalk 8 Theaters in Southern California, which will screen the subtitled Hindi thriller "Tashan" and the unsubtitled Tamil romance "Santhosh Subramaniam" starting April 25, along with a mix of second-run features such as "Fool's Gold" and "The Spiderwick Chronicles."
Hindi films are customarily released here with English subtitles, though the South Indian films rarely are — this issue is yet to be addressed by Adlabs or Phoenix executives.
Other regions that will get Big Cinemas in the coming months include San Jose, Calif.; Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Atlanta and Detroit.
The Indian conglomerate Reliance, which has $29 billion in assets and interests in power, telecom and financial services among other areas, teamed with Phoenix Theatres, a mainstream American exhibitor based in Knoxville, Tenn., after meeting with the company's founder at a motion picture exhibitors' convention last fall.
This may be big news for both film fans and Indian movie distributors, but the story has stayed under the radar because Reliance has preferred a quiet approach. Deals are still being finalized to purchase or lease local theaters, mostly from mom-and-pop owners.
"We're just getting a few of the [cities] under our belt," Phoenix founder Phil Zacheretti told India-West by phone April 22. "Then, we'll release wider information."
The chain may change the way Indian films are booked, released and promoted to NRIs, now that distributors such as Eros and Yash Raj will have to negotiate their terms with a larger entity of the scale of giant Adlabs.
"We'll bring a certain organization to the system," said Zacheretti. "We've got a long-term plan, using the Hollywood model to bring order to it."
Adlabs is itself an international distributor, with titles that include "Krrish" and "Johnny Gaddaar." Adlabs currently owns around 150 cinemas in India, with plans to double that number in the coming years. Adlabs also plans to open Indian cinemas in Britain, Malaysia, Nepal and Mauritius, reports BusinessWeek.
The new Big Cinemas will not only offer Indian films in the mix with American ones, but will also stock samosas and chai in their snack bars, said Zacheretti.
"I've been in this business for 33 years, and I went to Mumbai earlier this year. I have to say that I've learned more in the past six months than I did in those first 33 years!" he said.
The company will renovate each theater, making them "nicer and newer," he said, and upgrading their sound systems and air-conditioning. The total cost of the project was not made public.
The news of the Big Cinemas impending launch does not seem to worry Shiraz Jivani, who was the first theater owner in America to screen Indian movies at his Naz Cinema seven days a week back in 1992.
Jivani, who runs 20 screens in California, told India-West, "Everybody in India has their eye on the American market. But you can overgrow, too," he said, citing the example of the floundering General Cinemas chain, which went bankrupt and was acquired by AMC in 2002.
Jivani feels that no American company can properly serve the Indian American audience. "Handling an Indian crowd is just different," he said. "It takes an Indian to run an Indian theater."
Jivani also feels that it's not easy to program a constant mix of Indian and American movies in the same theater. He has tried renting screens for Indian movies in the Century Berryessa 10 in San Jose, Calif., but said that he and his customers felt uncomfortable. "My Berryessa customers told me, 'We got the impression we weren't wanted there.' One lady told me there was graffiti in the women's restroom there that called them 'Indian barbarians.'"
So Jivani — and perhaps the other independent Indian exhibitors around the country — are taking a wait-and-see attitude.
"I'm just going to sit back and watch them," Jivani told India-West. "At the end of six months or a year, I'll be king again."
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