Actor Akshay Kumar has had a difficult run at the box office in the last few years, with around a dozen flops to his name. His latest film, Housefull 5, did decently well but the film had a massive star cast to share the credit of the success. Before that, Kesari Chapter 2, did moderately well, as did the action movie Sky Force. But neither of them was a hit. Several of his biggest recent flops, films such as Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (BMCM), Mission Raniganj, and Bell Bottom, were all produced by Pooja Entertainment, the banner operated by Vashu Bhagnani and his son Jackky. The duo were under fire last year when many people who worked on BMCM alleged that they hadn’t been paid for their services after the film flopped. Produced on a reported budget of Rs 300 crore, the movie made just around Rs 100 crore globally. The same was the case with Ganapath, starring Tiger Shroff, which made less than Rs 20 crore. In fact, the banner hasn’t released a proper hit film in two decades.
But the Bhagnanis don’t rely completely on the movie business to earn a living. They also have a flourishing real estate and construction arm, and Vashu Bhagnani spoke about it in a recent interview. Chatting with Ronak Kotecha on YouTube, he said, “I went to London in 2018, and I wondered what to do. So, I bought a building in Mayfair. Then, I made five or six movies there… I’m a developer. I don’t believe in making money by investing your own money in projects. I make buildings like I make films… I’m the only person from Bollywood who has set up a studio in London. We have two floors with 60-foot high ceilings. It’s a two-acre property, I have a VFX set-up there, I have vanity vans there.”
He continued, “I can’t even speak English properly. When I was going to London, my daughter told me, ‘What will you do there? You can’t even speak English properly, and you won’t understand what they’re saying’. I said, ‘Let me try’. As soon as I landed, I set up a studio there. I made two buildings, and I made six films in five years. I used to make one building and one film, one building and one film. I’ve made 45 buildings in Mumbai so far, and they’ve all been sold. But I never sold the IP of my films. I still own my movies…”
In the same interview, he spoke about the difficulties he experienced after the BMCM controversy. “I was very upset by those stories. Imagine that I was actually bankrupt and I’d sold off my building. If I had actually sold it off, it would’ve been to pay people back, right? What’s wrong in that? I’m not a corporate employee, I’m doing business. If I suffer a loss, I will have to make up for it. But people spun this into a negative story. They said I’ve run away, that I don’t have money for food, that I couldn’t even afford flight tickets,” he said.
