Filmi News has not started publishing yet. The sections, the sample stories and the policies below show what this masthead will cover and how it will work. Nothing here has been reported or published.
The trade paper for Indian cinema: how films get made, financed, sold and screened.
Screen allocation is settled in the last days before release, between distributors and exhibitors carrying very different exposure to the same weekend. How those conversations run, why a show count matters more than a screen count, and why the number moves again by Sunday night.
Distributor advances, satellite and digital rights, the music deal and a producer's own exposure are usually stacked before principal photography begins. How a financing plan is assembled, which piece almost always closes last, and what a production does when that piece does not close at all.
Between a casting director's brief and a signed contract sit agents, self tapes, callbacks, chemistry reads and a great deal of waiting. A walk through the process as each industry runs it, and an honest account of which open calls are worth an unrepresented actor's time and which are not.
A minimum guarantee, a commission arrangement and an outright sale put the risk in three different places. What each structure means for the producer, the distributor and the overseas buyer taking a film into a diaspora market, and exactly where the argument starts when a release underperforms.
Occupancy, show timings, ticket pricing and the length of a hold shape a run far more than the opening figure does. How exhibitors read the first three days, when a film starts losing shows to the next release, and why the same title can be thriving in one city and finished in another.
While the screenings run, sales agents, financiers and buyers work through a parallel schedule of meetings. What a producer needs in hand before arriving, what a finished film is really being sold on at that stage, and how a project still in development gets packaged for the same room.
Post production is where a schedule slips and where a film is quietly rescued: dubbing, foley, the score, the final mix and the separate versions cut for each release format. Who signs off on what, in what order, and why audio is the part of the pipeline that gets compressed when a release date will not move.
One email a week for people who work in it: what went into production, what sold and to whom, what moved on the release calendar, and one part of the business taken apart properly. No verdicts on films, no gossip, no publicity reprinted as news.
Filmi News is a trade masthead. We report how Indian cinema gets made, financed, staffed, sold, distributed and shown: development and production, the financing stack and the rights layered on top of it, casting and crew, distribution deals territory by territory, exhibition and screen allocation, festivals and the markets running alongside them, and the crafts, music included, that a finished film is assembled from. Our reader works in it, or intends to. Two things about our structure are deliberate, and one of them is a correction. We file by what is happening rather than by language, because a distribution story is a distribution story whether the film is Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil or Telugu. And when we do name an industry, we name it, in full and alphabetically. There is no regional section here and no South Indian bucket. Grouping four large industries under one heading while listing two others by name is a ranking pretending to be a menu, and it is not one we are willing to publish. Every industry we cover is called by its own language, in the same typeface, in the same order every time. Filmi News has not started publishing yet, so this is the plan stated plainly rather than an archive. We report from Australia, which is why the overseas territory sits inside our coverage rather than at the end of it: buyers, importers, screen counts and diaspora returns are part of the business, not a footnote to it. The audience side of this subject is not ours. Whether a film is worth your Friday night, who is in it and where to stream it belongs to our sister masthead Jubliz, which covers Bollywood and Hollywood for the people watching rather than the people working. We will often write about the same film in the same week. Jubliz asks whether you should see it. We ask how it was financed, who it was sold to, and whether it earns the money back. Filmi News is published by SUKH SANDHU PTY LTD (ACN 679 292 392, ABN 49 679 292 392), an Australian company, and reports these industries from outside them.
We start from the documents the business actually runs on: the call sheet, the deal memo, the release schedule, the certification record, the exhibitor's programming grid. Where we describe a deal we say what kind of arrangement it is and who told us, and where a source cannot be named because speaking would cost them work, we say what kind of source is speaking instead. Collections, admissions and viewing figures are repeated only when we can state who counted them and by what method, and a number we cannot stand up is left out rather than rounded into a claim. Publicity material is labelled as publicity. We do not run verdicts on films, because judging a film is a different job from reporting the industry that made it, and craft coverage here asks how something was achieved rather than whether you will enjoy it. We do not report performers' private lives at all: it is not a trade story and it is not our business. We publish no personal information about individuals, and material shared with us in commercial confidence stays that way unless there is a clear public interest in publishing it. Coverage cannot be bought, we accept no junkets, gifts or paid travel, and we hold no interest in any studio, distributor, exhibitor, label or streaming service.
Errors are fixed on the page, with a dated note at the foot of the story explaining what was wrong and what changed, and a note at the top as well when the error went to the point of the piece. On this beat the recurring mistakes are names, credits, transliterations, dates, deal terms and screen counts, so a correction always carries the right version rather than only admitting the wrong one. Where we have described a deal structure or published a figure incorrectly, the note states the corrected term or number in full, because a reader who has already quoted us in a meeting needs the right one in front of them. We do not quietly rewrite a published sentence and we do not delete a story to make a mistake disappear. Readers, and any company we have written about, can request a correction through the contact page, and we respond with a decision either way. Where a point is genuinely contested and we cannot settle it, the story says so rather than presenting one side as fact.
Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu cinema, plus diaspora production, and any other film industry named by its own language rather than filed under a catch-all. There is no regional or South Indian section here on purpose. A structure that names Hindi and Punjabi individually while folding Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu into one bucket ranks those industries whatever the intention was, and each of them is larger, older and more distinct than that heading allows. So we file by what is happening, production, finance, distribution, exhibition, and name the industry inside the story.
We are the trade and Jubliz is the audience. We cover how films get financed, cast, made, sold, distributed and screened across every Indian film industry, for producers, distributors, exhibitors, crew, agents and the people trying to break into all of those. Jubliz covers Bollywood and Hollywood for the viewer: what to watch, who is in it, what it made and where to stream it. Same films, different questions. Theirs ends in a booking, ours ends in a contract.
No. We do not publish verdicts or star ratings, and we do not tell readers whether a film is worth their evening, which is Jubliz's job and a genuinely different craft. What we do publish is craft reporting: how a sequence was shot, how a schedule was met, how a score was recorded, what a department solved and at what cost. That is an appraisal of work rather than a recommendation to an audience.
Yes, through the contact page. Tell us what the document is, how it reached you and what must stay confidential, and we will tell you what we can and cannot protect before you send anything sensitive. We are most interested in deal terms, budgets, schedules, screen allocation and market activity. We do not publish personal information about individuals, and we remove identifying detail from any material we use.