Jyoti Deshpande
President, media and content business, RILAbout
With an enviable list of hits such as Laapataa Ladies, Shaitaan, Stree 2 and Mrs, Jyoti Deshpande, president (media and content business) of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), is obviously elated. A country obsessed by stars is finally appreciating good storytelling and that in a nutshell has been the Jio Studios strategy. “We put together a portfolio of stories that are from diverse genres, diverse in budgets and diverse in the audience that they are targeting. We heard hundreds of stories to come to the five to six we greenlit for the year. There was a big franchise like Stree 2 which didn’t have big stars and was a new genre (horror comedy); there was Shaitaan which was a horror super-natural but with a family angle stitched around it. Similarly, Laapataa Ladies, a new genre, not just went to the Oscars, it travelled the world,” she says. When Jio Studios chooses to make a film, the priority is the story and not the star cast. “A fantastic story and a big star cast is magic, but just having a star and a sub-standard story will not guarantee you success,” she says. Indian content is being recognised globally, but it is miles away from global audiences being addicted to it. “Laapataa... (which was on Netflix’s Top 10 international chart) is an outlier. I should be able to give you 10 stories like Laapataa, I should be able to say we have cracked a code where our films are being regularly consumed by mainstream global audience. We are working in that direction,” she says.
