UTV’s distribution strategy has acted as a catalyst to help ‘The Namesake’ break box office records in India!

After giving us 'Mississippi Masala' and 'Monsoon Wedding', Mira Nair has once again struck the right chords and created reverberations that will be heard across the globe at various award ceremonies in 2007-08.

Mira Nair’s THE NAMESAKE a co-production between UTV Motion Pictures & Fox Searchlight heralds the commercial acceptance of a new kind of English cinema in India. Boasting of superb performances from Irrfan Khan, Tabu and Kal Penn, the film has emerged a stunning box office success in the Indian market.

An intimate family saga that spans continents and generations yet stays close to the heart; The Namesake has set a benchmark for Indian crossover films at the box office. The first Indian crossover film to be co-produced by an Indian company, ‘The Namesake’ has achieved the milestone of logging in one of the highest per print average collections for an Indian crossover film.

It has left other critically and commercially acclaimed films such as Water, Monsoon Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, Bollywood Hollywood and The Guru far behind on this parameter.

The film has generated a cumulative per print average gross box office (GBO) of Rs. 10,51,570 in only 4 weeks of release, with a Gross India Box Office of 6.62 crs for week ended Apr 27

Apart from the unparalleled content, the innovative distribution strategy adopted by UTV for the movie has acted as a catalyst to achieve this success at the box office. Rather than going by the conventional distribution wisdom of maximum revenues with maximum prints, the film opened with a phase-wise release across the country, with just 48 prints in the top 10 cities in the first 7 days.

Siddharth Roy Kapur, EVP – Marketing, Distribution & Syndication, UTV says, “We were confident of the product and banked on positive reviews and word of mouth to drive demand for the film. The strategy worked. Buoyed by the tremendous response of the audience, in the second week we added 12 prints along with new territories and did the same print and territory expansion in Week 3. This enabled word of mouth to build and occupancy levels to be maximized. This also kept print costs low and optimized the realization per print, while ensuring that supply of tickets always matched demand and did not exceed it by too high a margin.”

This breakthrough strategy has helped the film sustain presence across markets for more than 4 weeks and it is still successfully running in theatres across the country.