Banijay Asia CEO Deepak Dhar On ‘The Night Manager’, Remaking ‘Suits’ And ‘The Good Wife’ And Making India A Regional Production Hub

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: For Banijay Asia’s Deepak Dhar, 2023 is shaping up to be one of the busiest in a three-decade career in Indian media.

Not only has he just launched The Night Manager India on Disney+ Hotstar and is delivering several scripted and unscripted shows, he is also working to position India has Banijay’s Asian production hub. “There are four pillars to our business,” he tells Deadline. “Unscripted, scripted formats, original scripted and developing India as the outsourcing hub for a lot of the rest of Asia.” The theory is countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, which share professional and audience taste similarities to India, will use Banijay’s Indian production assets for remakes of formats such as Temptation Island and Survivor. “They can be easily produced here,” says Dhar, who can tap local tax credits to help finance series.

His team is now at an “advanced stage of working out how this outsourcing hub will work,” he adds, noting that Banijay India had a practice run back when Endemol Shine India shot the Chinese version of Big Brother at an industrial base near Mumbai in 2015.

Even back, the plan was to turn India into the local production powerhouse for neighbors but much has happened in the intervening time: most notably, Banijay took over Endemol Shine Group as the world went into lockdown in 2020.