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Eros strikes Hollywood film deal
By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in London
Tuesday May 20 2008 16:35

The rapprochement of Bollywood and Hollywood has taken a further step forward with a wide-ranging joint venture between Lionsgate, the independent US film studio, and Eros International, the London-listed Indian entertainment group.

The partnership will see Lionsgate distribute up to 20 Eros Indian films a year in the US, while Eros will provide theatrical, home entertainment and television distribution in India for Lionsgate's library.

The two groups have also appointed Citigroup (NYSE:C) and JP Morgan to lead a fundraising round to support plans to co-produce Indian films with "cross-cultural" appeal to international audiences, each with a production budget of $10m to $20m.

Kishore Lulla, chairman and chief executive of Eros International, said he hoped to create "the Crouching Tiger of India", the Chinese-language film which became the highest-grossing foreign-language film in US history.

The improved distribution would provide rapid benefits to each company's bottom line, Mr Lulla said, as "the libraries are already paid for". Jon Feltheimer, Lionsgate chief executive, hailed the joint venture as "a superb opportunity to extend the Lionsgate brand to more than a billion new consumers worldwide".

Lionsgate will acquire North American home entertainment distribution rights to titles such as Eklavya and Gandhi My Father from Eros's library. Its own films will be distributed in India in original and dubbed versions.

Lets hope Lionsgate doesn't accept EROS's Pseudo-Prog or PAL to NTSC converted field averaged encodings. If Lionsgate doesn't want to ruin their credibility, they better re-encode those Hindi DVDs to their Hollywood standards.

Sounds good.. now we need to await the first Bollywood DVD by Lions gate.. At least the DVDs by Lions Gate will be new movies so it should benefit Lions Gate & the consumer provided the DVDs are done bye Lions Gate, and not repackaged Eros DVDs

why the hell, they let lion gate handle their bluray business

Did you mean
"why the hell, they let lion gate handle"
or did you mean
"why the hell, don't they let lion gate handle"