MUKESH AMBANI, ANIL AMBANI, Kumar Mangalam Birla, Anand Mahindra, Sajjan Jindal, Harsh Goenka, Yash Birla, B.K. Goenka, and Kishore Chhabria don’t go to the movies; the movies come to them. On the weekend of a Bollywood release, some of the biggest names in corporate India watch the film in the comfort of their homes. They are all members of Club X, part of the Rs 2,000 crore Valuable Group, whose flagship company UFO Moviez operates India’s largest digital satellite film distribution network.
Club X provides members with a digital cinema server called the CineBlaster, linking their private theatres to the company’s hub in Gurgaon. “The moment a movie is released, it gets downloaded in the CineBlaster in an encrypted format,” says Ameya Hete, director, Valuable Group. “Members call their relationship managers and ask to buy the licence for the movie and it is immediately unlocked,” adds Hete.
A licence costs Rs 20,000 for a single viewing. The member can choose the time of viewing and the movie can be paused. A senior executive at a conglomerate, declining to be identified, was invited to watch the Shah Rukh Khan hit Ra.One. During the movie, “the boss had to step out to take an urgent call. The movie was resumed after almost 45 minutes.” Club X licenses all local content—Tamil film Viswaroopam was beamed recently. As for international movies, the large studios such as Warner Brothers and Disney have a global policy against licensing to individuals, but a private production such as Zero Dark Thirty is available for licensing.
For top executives who travel extensively, Club X is a blessing. Industry sources say that before Club X, Mukesh Ambani, a huge movie fan, would get prints delivered to his home rather than wait up to three months for the movie to be released on DVDs or Blu-ray discs. B.K. Goenka, chairman of the $3.5 billion (Rs 18,977 crore) Welspun group, says, “Earlier, we hardly got time to watch a movie in a theatre; now I watch six to eight movies a month.” Relationship managers keep track of their clients’ movie preferences and travel schedules, “informing them if they’ve missed something they would’ve liked”, says Hete. “Some members are too well known to go to a theatre without being mobbed.”
Although memberships cost Rs 6.5 lakh in addition to licences, it takes more than wealth to become a member of Club X. Currently, the near-200 memberships—60% are executives and industrialists, the rest celebrities—are by invitation only and membership is capped at 2,000. Hete says “referrals from existing members help” but the final decision rests with the senior Club X team, which takes the applicant’s social standing into account. “We reject one or two requests every month,” says Hete, adding that they got a lot of requests for memberships after Barfi! was licensed by several members. The equipment owned plays a huge part in deciding member eligibility since, according to Hete, one needs to have a professional grade private theatre at home. This is to ensure that the movies are seen at a certain quality, “in the way the producers intended them to be seen”. Although Club X does not provide the equipment, it does make recommendations.
The first step to setting up a private theatre at home is to demarcate a minimum space of 500 sq. ft. “At least one side of the room should be 25 feet to have a good throw distance, [the distance between seating and the screen],” says Sanjay Peer, head of business development, Club X. He adds that the bulk of the spending on equipment is on the sound and projection systems, which are often better than cinema-grade. Fortune India spoke to people who’ve been invited to some of these theatres.
“Amitabh Bachchan has some of the best sound equipment in the country. He uses Wilson Audio’s Alexandria X2, a handcrafted speaker, which costs upwards of $158,000 each. Of course, this is without the amplifiers,” says a senior professional who did not want to be named, who was invited to a show at Bachchan’s home. Many private theatres use audio equipment that can cost up to Rs 2 crore. Cinema-grade projectors from Christie, Panasonic, Digital Projection, and Barco are popular and can cost up to Rs 80 lakh. D-Box motion seats, programmed to sway for impact, are Rs 5 lakh each and most home theatres are 12-seaters. Then there’s ambience. “Some people put up old movie posters they have collected. Once the basic equipment is in place, you can spend what you like on creating the ambience,” says Hete. Several theatres have bars put in, while others have popcorn makers and coffee machines.
Hete says, “To build a 200-seater multiplex costs between Rs 1 crore and Rs 1.5 crore, but the equipment used in private theatres can cost three times that.” Club X’s members are willing to make the investment however, as their personal movie shows are frequently social. Kishore Chhabria, chairman of Allied Blenders and Distillers, makers of Officer’s Choice whisky, invites friends over often. “Movie watching is a social experience,” he says. “We do five to seven screenings per month.” Peer says the majority of screenings are on weekends, with almost 80% requests being for the latest Bollywood releases, with the occasional request “for classics”. On average, Club X customers request two screenings of the same movie.
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