Iconic superstar Amitabh Bachchan has starred some of Indian filmdom's biggest hits in his illustrious four-decade career. Bachchan also changed the television landscape when he hosted the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millonaire in 2000, a job he continues to do in between his many film projects. International audiences will finally get a glimpse of him in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby in which he will briefly share screen time with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. Commenting on his fleeting role, Bachchan said in a Twitter message, “By the time you look down on your popcorn to pick another morsel, I'd be gone from the film...kinda short service... But with giants of Hollywood...”
NEW DELHI — Leading Indian VFX player Prime Focus announced Wednesday that the company will establish an office in Beijing. The announcement was made at the ongoing Shanghai International Film Festival. Mumbai-based Prime Focus currently maintains offices in Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York and London.
The Beijing office is expected to open later this year. The move into China comes on the heels of the recent joint venture between Prime Focus, AID Partners Capital and Chinese partner Zhejiang Jingqi Wenhua Chuanbo Company. AID Partners Capital is a Hong Kong-based private equity firm focused on expansion capital and buyout opportunities primarily in the media and entertainment sector. In March of this year AID Partners made an equity investment of $10 million (Rupees 550 million) in Prime Focus’ creative services business subsidiary, Prime Focus World NV (PFW).
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“After India, Europe and North America, China was the growth story waiting to happen,” said Prime Focus founder Namit Malhotra. “We are fortunate to have had AID Partners Capital extend the relationship beyond investment into a formal market entry vehicle to expand our footprint into one of the most influential markets in the world. I look forward to offering our full suite of creative and technology services to the Chinese market.”
“Today, we deliver best-in-class 3D conversion and VFX services to the foremost Hollywood studios and extend Media Cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning and Technology Infrastructure to manage assets and workflows for global media companies … We are all set to bring the best of Prime Focus to China, one of the largest content markets in the world,” added Prime Focus CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan.
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Prime Focus has worked on many Hollywood films, including this year’s Cannes festival opening film, Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby, for which the company offered stereo VFX, 3D conversion and archive footage colorization services. Also screened at Cannes this year was Bernardo Bertolucci’s nine-time Academy Award-winning film The Last Emperor, for which Prime Focus was the exclusive 3D conversion partner. In the past, the company has offered its services on Men in Black 3, Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Wrath of the Titans, Mirror Mirror, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Avatar, to name a few. Upcoming releases include Paramount’s World War Z and Sony Pictures’ White House Down.
