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Why Jio made Dhurandhar and then gave it away
But there’s one company in India with every piece of it refuses to spin it
In 2017, Disney walked away from a fortune. It pulled Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar off Netflix, ate the lost licensing cheques, and poured the money into a platform it was building from scratch. The logic was the logic of every integrated media company since — if you own the content and you own the pipe, you don't rent your crown jewels to a rival. Content feeds the platform, the platform feeds subscriptions, subscriptions fund the next film. Apple runs it, Amazon runs it, and the entire point of owning both a studio and a streamer is that each is supposed to feed the other.
Reliance has every piece of that machine. Jio Studios is the biggest film studio in India — it made Dhurandhar, the highest-grossing Indian film ever. JioStar is the biggest streaming platform in the country, half a billion users, assembled partly from the Disney+ Hotstar business Disney handed over on its way out. Everything Disney took decades to build, Reliance already has under one roof.
And roughly 98% of what Jio Studios makes goes to the platforms Reliance is meant to be fighting. When it made the biggest film in the country's history, it gave it away to Netflix.
So what does Reliance know something the rest of us don't?
Praveen argues for the platform-and-synergy side of the table: the Disney playbook, the flywheel, the studio you own and can brief at will. His two guests have run the platforms he's describing and now produce films for a living fight back against his position by explaining why you can't monopolise storytelling, why your own studio becomes the 301st vendor on your list, and why a franchise is a decade of work no amount of vertical integration can shortcut.
Vijay Subramaniam — founder of 29th September Works. Spent 11 years at Walt Disney India as VP of Media Networks, then built Amazon Prime Video India's content engine as Head of Content. Now also a movie producer (Padakalam).
Srishti Behl — founder of Starfish Stories, working on IP and international co-productions. Former Director of Original Films at Netflix India (Bulbbul, Serious Men, AK vs AK) and former CEO of Phantom Studios, from a family with a long lineage in Hindi cinema.
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By The KenBut there’s one company in India with every piece of it refuses to spin it
In 2017, Disney walked away from a fortune. It pulled Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar off Netflix, ate the lost licensing cheques, and poured the money into a platform it was building from scratch. The logic was the logic of every integrated media company since — if you own the content and you own the pipe, you don't rent your crown jewels to a rival. Content feeds the platform, the platform feeds subscriptions, subscriptions fund the next film. Apple runs it, Amazon runs it, and the entire point of owning both a studio and a streamer is that each is supposed to feed the other.
Reliance has every piece of that machine. Jio Studios is the biggest film studio in India — it made Dhurandhar, the highest-grossing Indian film ever. JioStar is the biggest streaming platform in the country, half a billion users, assembled partly from the Disney+ Hotstar business Disney handed over on its way out. Everything Disney took decades to build, Reliance already has under one roof.
And roughly 98% of what Jio Studios makes goes to the platforms Reliance is meant to be fighting. When it made the biggest film in the country's history, it gave it away to Netflix.
So what does Reliance know something the rest of us don't?
Praveen argues for the platform-and-synergy side of the table: the Disney playbook, the flywheel, the studio you own and can brief at will. His two guests have run the platforms he's describing and now produce films for a living fight back against his position by explaining why you can't monopolise storytelling, why your own studio becomes the 301st vendor on your list, and why a franchise is a decade of work no amount of vertical integration can shortcut.
Vijay Subramaniam — founder of 29th September Works. Spent 11 years at Walt Disney India as VP of Media Networks, then built Amazon Prime Video India's content engine as Head of Content. Now also a movie producer (Padakalam).
Srishti Behl — founder of Starfish Stories, working on IP and international co-productions. Former Director of Original Films at Netflix India (Bulbbul, Serious Men, AK vs AK) and former CEO of Phantom Studios, from a family with a long lineage in Hindi cinema.