Fox Entertainment rejoices Avatar, MNIK success

Excerpts from India Business Hour on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » Nifty BSE | NSE 10/02/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

Last year, Fox Entertainment was celebrating the success of Slumdog Millionaire. This year it's toasting to the record breaking Avatar and has also broken new ground with its bollywood foray My Name is Khan (MNIK).

In an entertainment with CNBC-TV18, Jim Gianopulos, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fox Entertainment, spoke about the relationship with Karan Johar's Dharma Productions and Shahrukh Khan's Red Chillies Entertainment.

Below is a verbatim transcript of an exclusive entertainment with Jim Gianopulos on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: What is your relationship with Red Chillies Entertainment?

A: It materialized as a partnership and the film was expensive because so much of it was shot in the US and in multiple locations. The film is about a journey across the country. So those multiple locations and the cost of making that film certainly pushed the budget up higher than a normal bollywood film. It wasn't one of this-here is the money, see you in a long time. We wouldn't have done that they didn't want that. There were many number of people who they could have sold the film to. They made arrangements for every one of their films.

Both of us wanted to try the relationship, improve that there could be a great partnership and the benefit of the synergies of coupling great talent and worldwide marketing and distribution. From the very beginning it was viewed as a partnership enterprise. There was deference, to the extent that we deferred to Karan and Sharukh in terms of how it was handled and how I was positioned here in India. They deferred completely to us in the rest of the world and particularly the US. This didn't mean it wasn't collaborative in every corner of the world that it was released.

Q: Are you happy with the collections?

A: Yes, very happy.

Q: When you look at the India Theatrical collection, while it opened really well, it kept falling by more than half in all the following or consecutive weeks, was that disappointing?

A: No because this was a movie which was intentionally looking to change the form and test the limits of the form. It wasn't a conventional bollywood film and we heard it in some of the smaller markets and some part of the country where people said, I don't get what is Shahrukh Khan doing in that role and why is the film in that sort of a narrative form. The fact that it didn't play in some of the smaller markets in the country was really not a surprise because it wasn't conventional and it wasn't intended to be.