Results (775 found)

MagazineMay 28, 2026

Beyond the Silver Screen: Inside Ranveer Singh's $170 Million Brand Empire

In a country where celebrity endorsements are a cultural institution, Ranveer Singh has quietly ascended to a throne of his own making. Not the throne of a king in a Sanjay Leela Bhansali epic—though he has worn those crowns too—but something arguably more durable: the throne of India's most strategic celebrity brand architect. At 40, Singh presides over an endorsement portfolio of more than 40 brands, a net worth estimated between ₹350 crore and ₹400 crore (approximately $40–47 million), and a brand valuation of $170.7 million, securing him the second spot on Kroll's 2025 Celebrity Brand Valuation report, trailing only cricketer Virat Kohli. For each endorsement deal, he commands between ₹3 crore and ₹5 crore, while a single sponsored social media post fetches around ₹80 lakh ($95,000)

MagazineMay 28, 2026

India’s $30 Million Bet to Become the World’s Animation & Gaming Foundry

At first glance, ₹250 crore (approximately $30 million) seems like a rounding error in India’s $550 billion Union Budget. But for the country’s Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, and Comics (AVGC) sector, this allocation is anything but modest. It is a carefully aimed lever — one designed to pry open a global creative economy currently dominated by the United States, Japan, and Canada.

ImpactMay 28, 2026

Why A. R. Rahman’s Bollywood Remarks Sparked A Much Bigger Conversation About Power, Identity And Creative Space In Indian Cinema

A. R. Rahman’s recent remarks about feeling sidelined in Bollywood triggered a massive online debate that quickly expanded beyond one interview. The conversation evolved into a larger reflection on power structures, regional cinema, creative politics and Bollywood’s changing place in Indian entertainment.

MagazineMay 28, 2026

The 11,000-Film Bridge to Beijing: Inside Eros International's Landmark iQIYI Content Deal—And the $1 Billion Library Sale That Could Redefine the Global Market for Indian Cinema

In September 2018, in a conference room in Mumbai, the executives of a company that had spent four decades building the world's largest library of Indian cinema signed a document that would, in retrospect, become the foundation of Bollywood's entire streaming strategy in China. Eros International—the distributor, producer, and streaming platform that owns or controls the rights to more than 11,000 Indian films spanning Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and every other major language of the subcontinent—had just concluded a content-licensing agreement with iQIYI, the Baidu-owned streaming giant often described as the "Netflix of China." The deal, the companies announced, would make Eros Now "the first South Asian OTT player to make inroads into the Chinese digital space." iQIYI, which at the time claimed over 500 million monthly active users, would begin streaming titles from Eros's catalogue—from Shah Rukh Khan's Devdas to Salman Khan's Dabangg—to Chinese audiences who had demonstrated, through the theatrical success of films like Dangal (₹1,200 crore in China alone) and Secret Superstar, an extraordinary appetite for Indian cinema. The financial terms were not disclosed, but Eros International CEO Kishore Lulla told Reuters at the time that the company was "targeting about US$10 million in revenue in the first year through this deal."

MagazineMay 28, 2026

The ₹30 Crore Note: How AR Rahman's Record-Breaking Ramayana Deal—and His "Terrifying" Hans Zimmer Collaboration—Is Rewriting the Economics of Film Music in India

In the spring of 2026, as Nitesh Tiwari's Ramayana entered its final months of post-production ahead of a Diwali release that the entire Indian film industry is watching with a mixture of hope and anxiety, a single number began circulating through the trade that was, in its own way, as staggering as the film's ₹4,000 crore budget. The number was ₹30 crore. It was not a visual-effects line item or a star's fee. It was the amount that A.R. Rahman, the two-time Academy Award-winning composer, was reportedly charging to create the music for the most expensive film in Indian cinema history—plus a share of the profits

ImpactMay 28, 2026

India’s Café Culture Is Becoming a Bigger Story About Loneliness, Work and Urban Life

India’s booming café culture is no longer just about coffee or aesthetics. Across urban India, cafés are quietly turning into workspaces, emotional escapes and social refuges for a generation navigating loneliness, flexible work and fast-changing city life.

MagazineMay 28, 2026

The Cannes Disruption: How Punjabi, Malayalam, and Kannada Cinema Stormed the World's Most Prestigious Film Festival—Without a Single Palme d'Or Contender

The 79th Cannes Film Festival closed its doors five days ago, and for the first time in recent memory, India did not send a single film to compete for the Palme d'Or. The official selection—curated by festival director Thierry Frémaux and his team—was dominated by Pedro Almodóvar, Asghar Farhadi, and James Gray. The Indian contingent that had, in previous years, carried the hopes of a billion-strong film industry into the Competition section was absent. And yet, by the time the final credits rolled on the Croisette, something remarkable had happened. India had sent its largest and most diverse delegation of regional-language films in the festival's history—Punjabi, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, and Hindi projects spanning the Marché du Film, Critics' Week, La Cinef, Cannes Classics, and the official market—and had demonstrated, more convincingly than any Palme d'Or victory could have, that the future of Indian cinema on the global stage belongs not to Bollywood, but to the regions that Bollywood has spent decades treating as its commercial hinterlands.

MagazineMay 28, 2026

The ₹300 Crore Zombie That Almost Didn't Rise: How a FWICE Ban, a Don 3 Exit, and a ₹45 Crore Compensation Demand Turned Ranveer Singh's 'Pralay' Into Bollywood's Most Dramatic Pre-Production—Before a Single Frame Was Shot

Sometime in the early weeks of 2026, as Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge was completing its historic rampage through the global box office, the producers of Ranveer Singh's next film received a phone call that transformed their project from an ambitious creative gamble into a geopolitical standoff. Ritesh Sidhwani, co-founder of Excel Entertainment, had reached out to Birla Studios—the newly established production house that was set to back Pralay, the ₹300 crore zombie epic that was supposed to cement Ranveer's status as the most commercially potent star in Hindi cinema. Sidhwani's message was direct and unambiguous: do not fund this film. Do not begin shooting. Do not proceed with pre-production. Not until the actor who had walked out of Don 3—who had, in Excel's telling, abandoned a project after months of pre-production and left the studio holding ₹40 crore in sunk costs—had resolved the dispute he had created.

MagazineMay 28, 2026

The Rental System Is Dead: How Ram Charan's ₹350 Crore 'Peddi' Became the Battleground for Telangana's Single-Screen Survival—And How Chiranjeevi Stepped In to Save It

For nearly four decades, the single-screen theatres of Telangana have operated on a principle so simple it was never questioned: the exhibitor pays a fixed rent, the producer collects it, and the box office—whether triumphant or tragic—belongs to whoever took the risk. The system was designed for an era when audiences had nowhere else to go, when the only screen in town was the one with the faded posters and the creaking seats, and when the relationship between the man who made the film and the man who screened it was governed by handshake and habit rather than contract and calculation. That era is now over. The system that sustained it is being dismantled. And the film that finally broke it—or, more precisely, the film whose near-death experience finally forced the industry to acknowledge that the system was already broken—is Ram Charan's Peddi, a ₹350 crore sports action drama that was never meant to be a revolutionary document but has become one anyway.

MagazineMay 28, 2026

The God-Hero, The Comedian-Director, and The ₹260 Crore Resurrection

For more than ten years, Suriya Sivakumar has been the most confounding figure in Tamil cinema. He is, by any measure, one of the finest actors of his generation—a performer who has oscillated between the raw intensity of Kaakha Kaakha and the quiet dignity of Soorarai Pottru, who has carried films on his shoulders with a conviction that few of his contemporaries can match, and who has built a body of work that any actor in any language would be proud to claim. And yet, for more than a decade, the one thing that had eluded him was the thing that the industry measures most obsessively: a blockbuster.