Why Jio made Dhurandhar and then gave it away
About this episode
The episode discusses Reliance's unique position in the media landscape and its decision to give away its highest-grossing film to Netflix.
But there’s one company in India with every piece of it refuses to spin it In 2017, Disney walked away from a fortune. It pulled Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar off Netflix, ate the lost licensing cheques, and poured the money into a platform it was building from scratch. The logic was the logic of every integrated media company since — if you own the content and you own the pipe, you don't rent your crown jewels to a rival. Content feeds the platform, the platform feeds subscriptions, subscriptions fund the next film. Apple runs it, Amazon runs it, and the entire point of owning both a studio and a streamer is that each is supposed to feed the other. Reliance has every piece of that machine. Jio Studios is the biggest film studio in India — it made Dhurandhar, the highest-grossing Indian film ever. JioStar is the biggest streaming platform in the country, half a billion users, assembled partly from the Disney+ Hotstar business Disney handed over on its way out. Everything Disney took decades to build, Reliance already has under one roof. And roughly 98% of what Jio Studios makes goes to the platforms Reliance is meant to be fighting. When it made the biggest film in the country's…
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