A poster of Traffic Signal; (below) Percept’s big breakthrough film Hanuman

Bollywood is going the Hollywood way big time. One single Indian company is producing 22 films at one go! In just two years — 2007 and 2008 — Percept Picture Company (PPC) will roll out 21 Hindi films and Ashvin Kumar’s (Ritu Kumar’s son whose short film The Little Terrorist was nominated for the Oscars) international project Forest, which is in English. This, of course, comes on the back of PPC’s big-screen success in the last two years courtesy Malamaal Weekly, Corporate, Hanuman and Dor.

“Our track record till now has been very good,” Mahesh Ramanathan, chief operating officer of PPC, tells Metro. “We have had different kinds of involvement with different movies. For Sahara, we have been executive producer for films like Corporate and Dor, we have co-produced films like Hanuman and we have also acquired and sold movies like Yahaan and Page 3. No one can have a 100 per cent success rate but we do have a very high proportion of successful projects and that has inspired us to dream big.”

The spate of PPC productions will start in February next year with Madhur Bhandarkar’s much-awaited Traffic Signal, the third part of his “real” trilogy after Page 3 and Corporate. Then Robby Grewal, who made the Sushmita Sen thriller Samay, will have his second release in MP3 — Mera Pehla Pehla Pyar, “an adolescent love story of the young, for the young”.

Arjun Bali’s Ru-ba-ru starring Randeep Hooda will follow next. Then there’s Anubhav Sinha’s dark thriller Kabootar. Nagesh Kukunoor will make two films for PPC — Tasveer with Akshay Kumar and Aashayein with John Abraham. There will be three big comedies too, to be directed by the masters, David Dhawan, Priyadarshan and Anees Bazmee. But the biggest one will be Shoojit Sircar’s Johnny Walker with Amitabh Bachchan in the title role.

If that’s not enough, PPC will also produce two sequels in the form of Hanuman 2 and Malamaal Weekly 2. “The sequels were not planned as a reaction to the trend in the industry,” reveals Ramanathan. “Hanuman 2 was announced much before sequels starting doing well. An animation film takes time to be made and so the film will only release next Diwali. As for Malamaal Weekly 2, the objective is to capitalise the brand value already created. We can’t turn every film into a sequel, only those stories which lend themselves naturally to a second part.”

Toeing the trend-line is something PPC is not willing to do. As a result the company is making movies of all genres. “It’s a simple rule — if we stick to one brand, our success will be lower,” the chief operating executive adds. “The industry produces around 250 films a year out of which only 25 to 30 are successful. Keeping this 10 to 12 per cent success rate in mind, we are always trying to diversify our portfolio. So in our projects you will find everything from mythology to animation to action to comedy. This way we are also diversifying the risk.”

If the genres are different, so are the budgets. “We have a creative team evaluating the demands of the scripts,” adds Ramanathan. “We never sign up the stars first. We decide on a script and then look for actors who best fit the characters. The budget is incidental. Like for Johnny Walker, we decided that only Amitji can play the role. Our sole goal is to make great-looking good cinema.”

Ramanathan agrees companies like PPC along with the likes of UTV and Adlabs is bringing corporate culture to an essentially unorganised industry. “The corporate phase has been there from 2002-2003 but we are now scaling up the business model,” he says. “And now that the achievement is more visible, we will only grow bigger and better.”