Bollywoodhungama, once again satisfying the industry nerd within me, has come through with some interesting figures related to the two big Valentine’s releases.  As expected, Ghayal Once Again and Sanam Teri Kasam both flat-lined last weekend, which should mean there is nothing standing in the way of a massive all-India hit with Fitoor.  Only, late-breaking news shows that there is another player in the game, and he is coming in hard.

According to the above post, T-Series, producers of Airlift, are coming out with 2000+ prints of Sanam Re, even more than they were for Airlift, and way more than average for a romance film.  The article talks about how 2000+ is really only standard for a Khan film.

What makes this even more surprising is that T-Series is a very recent entry in the producing game.  While they have had a vast music empire since the 80s, built primarily on film soundtracks, they only started actually producing movies a few years back.  Well, technically I think Tum Bin in 2001 was their first film (Man, Priyanshu Chatterjee was cute!  Like some strange combo of Abhishek and Jeff Goldblum), and they dabbled with a few other films since then.  But it was in only 2012 that they really hit the ground running with both Hate Story 2 and Yaariyan.  Both films got a fairly wide release, and T-Series was the primary producer and distributor on both (some of the earlier films they’d been involved with were co-productions with Bhatt Films or Eros).

Much more importantly, Yaariyan was the first time the Kumar family that runs T-Series had some actual skin in the game.  The family has always been businessman rather than artists.  But Bhushan Kumar (company founder Gulshan Kumar’s son) married an actress, Divya Khosla (now Divya Khosla Kumar).  She was only in a couple of big name films before she got married and retired, but the most important thing she ever acted in, so far as I am concerned, is this amazing music video:

(I saw it on some music video show back in college, and then it took me years to track it down again.  I have the video bookmarked now for any time I need a smile)

Back in 2012, Divya decided she wanted to direct, and made Yaariyan, which was a minor success.  Divya, as the consort of the T-Series head, was the biggest name attached to the film, everyone else in the cast was a talented nobody.  Divya herself gave various interviews and so on, letting the media into the Kumar household for the first time in forever (for well-known reasons, they are a fairly private family).  And it worked!  Ish.  The film did all right, made its money back at least.  And Divya proved to be a competent director.  Hate Story 2 was actually the bigger success, and led to a whole Hate Story franchise for T-Series.

And now, after a few years of solid hits and one blockbuster (Airlift), T-Series is sending out a Divya release again.  I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the release dates of these two films were actually calculated so that Airlift would support Sanam Re.  And now Bhushan Kumar is taking all the goodwill and power he has earned in the past few years and betting it all on his wife.

Now that’s romantic!