Jio Studios invests '2K cr in producing over 100 movies and digital shows

Reliance Industries-owned Jio Studios has unveiled a slate of over 100 movies and web shows in multiple languages and genres to be released over the next 18-24 months on Viacom18's JioCinema streaming app. RIL president, media business, Jyoti Deshpande told ET the content slate includes over 70 movies, and the rest are digital shows. Almost 70% of the movies are in Hindi. It has also lined up content in other languages like Marathi and Gujarati.

"It took three years to complete this slate of 100+ stories. We will start rolling out this content in May," she said. The studio has completed 5 years of operations and has released 50 content assets across movies and web shows.

The content studio has spent ₹2,000 crore on producing content with the bulk of these investments happening in the last two years, Deshpande added. It plans to double the investment as the content production behemoth amps up offerings in south Indian languages.

"We have invested over ₹2,000 crore on producing content. A lot of these investments happened in the last two years," she said adding, "We have not even scratched the tip of south India. And as we double down on this market, we foresee the investment doubling over the next few years." The ambitious content slate already makes Jio Studios the biggest content studio in the country by a long mile.

Deshpande affirmed that nothing of this scale has ever been seen before. "Jio Studios has created the Jio of the content business," she said, highlighting the scale of Reliance's content arm.

Talking about the distribution strategy for the movies, Deshpande said some movies will follow the traditional windowing strategy of theatres first, while some movies will be released digitally first, but marketed like a theatrical release.

"Our dream is to do a day-and-date release with cinemas someday, when JioFiber reaches an even higher critical mass," she stated.

Jio Studios' content mix includes a mix of tentpole, medium, and small-budget films and shows. According to Deshpande, a typical big-budget movie costs over ₹250 crore. Deshpande said Jio Studios has profit-sharing partnerships with some of the top talent in the industry.