Bollywood taking on Hollywood

Bollywood is going places... Now it’s going to the pinnacle global entertainment ie. Hollywood and with big money in tow.

Anil Ambani's Reliance Big Entertainment (RBE) has signed deals to provide development funds to eight leading creative forces in Hollywood. The deals, announced on Sunday, includes those with production houses like Nicolas Cage’s Saturn Productions, Jim Carrey’s JC 23 Entertainment, George Clooney’s Smokehouse Productions, Chris Columbus’s 1492 Pictures, Tom Hanks’s Playtone Productions, Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and Jay Roach’s Everyman Pictures.

This basically means that the company will provide for the creation for each of the Hollywood A grader's. Reliance Big Entertainment chairman Amit Khanna said: "This initiative will yield up to 30 scripts in the next two years. We are confident that at least 10 of them will go into production during that period." The movies that will be made could initially amount to $1 billion.

"There will be no creative interference," said advertising guru Prasoon Joshi, who is also in on the deal. When creative freedom is combined with the huge cache of funds that Reliance will pump in, Bollywood is set to become a very significant player in the west.

It must be noted that the ADAG has been venturing into the entertainment business, full flow. Just recently, it signed a deal with producer - director Vidhu Vinod Chopra's VCF (Vinod Chopra Films).

The Aamir Khan starrer film, which is tentative titled Idiot, is a part of this deal and will be the first to go on floors around the month of June. The movie will be directed by Rajkumar Hirani. The lead actress for the film is yet to be finalized. Idiot is a comic film with a social message.

The other details of the deal are still being worked out. "Vidhu is in the process of finalizing the line up of his films and the details should be worked out within a few days," says Reliance Entertainment chairman Amit Khanna.

Other movies in Chopra's stable included Talisman that has been adapted from the novel Chandrakanta. It will be directed by ad film maker Ram Madhvani and stars Amitabh Bachchan. The promo of Talisman was aired with the theatrical release of Lage Raho Munnabhai. Another film to be directed by Chopra, titled 64 Squares, was also on his agenda. However, the current film's status is not known.

Reliance Entertainment also recently signed a six-film deal with Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar's Excel Entertainment. Work is currently underway for the first movie in the deal Rock On starring Farhan Akhtar, Prachi Desai, Arjun Rampal, Purab Kohli, Sahana Goswami and Luke Kenny. It is scheduled to release in the third quarter of 2008.

The company has also signed a co-production deal with filmmaker Sudhir Mishra for two films. The first film under this deal will be a comic-thriller and the second will be a realistic thriller titled Foot Soldier.