Film Incentives: The Indian Landscape
India is known to pride itself on its movies and its storytelling culture. This is reflected in the success of “Bollywood” over the years. Now, due to the emergence of Video OTT (Over-The-Top), platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar to name a few, have changed the movie watching and movie making landscape and it is time India should cash in on this change to create a more robust impact globally.
Sacred Games, originally a book by the Indian author, Vikram Chandra, was given the green light to be adapted as a Netflix original show. After the success of the first season which featured Indian actors and actresses, the show was renewed for a second season and gathered an INR 100 Cr investment from Netflix. Usually, Indian shows on OTT platforms gather an investment of around INR 3-4 Cr per episode for a range of 12 episodes. The success of a property like Sacred Games induced Netflix to increase its budget and introduce the concept of showrunner and establish a writer’s room. Netflix also claims that it had taken a lot more post-production facilities onboard compared to any other Hindi film so that the final product has the global appeal that Netflix is known for. After Sacred Games, other large scale Indian bred shows that Netflix has in production include – Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with Vishal Bhardwaj (prominent Hindi Film Industry Director) and a spin-off on the Baahubali franchise (titled Baahubali: Before the Beginning). Sacred Games is just one of the few examples of how India can establish its filmmaking prowess on a global scale in terms of production as well as post-production for a property that is born and bred in India. Extraction, a Netflix original film, which was primarily shot in India was the most-watched film in the first four weeks of release on a global scale on Netflix and was viewed by 99 million accounts. This movie is one that relied heavily on VFX and the VFX for the same was done by a studio that also operates out of Pune, India – Method Studios. Many studios such as these have not yet been brought into the limelight and this could very well be India’s next navratanas in this space pf VFX. A few of the achievements by larger Post-Production and Visual Effects studios from India are listed below:
Prime Focus – 200+ VFX shots for Avatar, Visual Effects for Gravity (which won them an Oscar in 2010 for Best Visual Effects), Interstellar (which won them an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 2015). Nominated for five other Oscars for Tree of Life, X-
