Riding The 'Good' Content Wave

In the fiercely competitive Indian entertainment industry where big production houses pump in huge sums of money to make films work, Manish Mundra’s humble production house — through its inclination towards good content over big budgets — has seemed to have found a niche for itself.

- Vanita D'Souza

As a teenager, Manish Mundra was fascinated with the world of cinema. Watching Bollywood movies, especially those starring Amitabh Bachchan, inspired him greatly. And this small town boy from Deoghar in Bihar was able to see the world beyond, and realize his dream.

But film business is an expensive affair, hence it took a backbench as he worked his way up and started spearheading Indorama Eleme Petrochemicals Limited. But his passion didn’t die. In the early 2010s, Mundra produced his first film Ankhon Dekhi, directed by Rajat Kapoor, where he learned many lessons. In a telephonic conversation with Entrepreneur India, he shares that the idea was to do one film and then move on in life. But life had some other twists to unfold. The film was critically acclaimed but wasn’t commercially successful. And he said to himself — ‘Look, I cannot go out like this,’ “The point is if I make good films, can we make it commercially visible? And if we do so, we need to create a mechanism or a body, which can sustain on its own, deliver quality cinema and yet recover the cost of production of the film — and that’s why we entered the most structured form of film making,” he adds about starting up his production house, Drishyam Films.

THE JUGGLER