Why a Filmmaker is an Entrepreneur?

Pradyumna Madan Dinni
3 min readMay 2, 2019

Cinema is the most celebrated source of entertainment in India after cricket, and of course Engineering!

I found movies and entrepreneurship similar in many ways and analogized a filmmaker and an entrepreneur here.

Courtesy: Google
  1. The first analogy comes from the support of family and friends. Quite often, our parents don’t want us to foray into these industries only because of instability in these fields and quote many examples of failures to refute us.

    Also, according to many friends, it’s more logical to stalk and follow a girl after witnessing them from movies than becoming a filmmaker or an entrepreneur after watching movies on them (with my experience of getting a sarcastic reply from my friend when I told an idea of becoming an entrepreneur after watching “The Wolf of the wall street”).
  2. All they have is an idea and some skills to make the idea triumph.
    Passion is the only driving force to both professions and yes, they start with an idea in their mind and work on that idea for a period of months (sometimes years) to take into reality. Many quit their professions to pursue their dreams.
  3. Lack of resources
    Here, multitasking is the only option they have, and we call Bootstrapping in case of startups and Indie filmmakers in films. Because of the trust and lack of experience, most first generation entrepreneurs and filmmakers won’t have proper resources to start their venture to the fullest.
  4. Investment and Team
    In film-making, the team is formed after an investor steps in, and in startups, the founder should form a team apriori. Pitching the idea/story to the investor(s) is the key task here as in they pour in the money if we they are impressed with the idea.
  5. Less success rate
    As the statistics show that around 90% of the Indian startups fail within five years of their venture and thus the success rate is less. The same case with the films. Out of many films release in a calendar year, the success ratio is very less. Hardly one out of couple of films releasing in a month is a box office success.
    There are many reasons for the high failure rate, and the Indian cinema is inclining towards content rather than star material these days.
  6. Inspirations and remakes
    If a film is successful in a language or a region, then filmmakers won’t hesitate to remake them in their native language. Commercial producers are known to acquire the remake rights of a super hit film to shoot the film in their version.
    Likewise, if an idea works out well in a country, entrepreneurs try to implement the similar idea in their region.
    For instance, take Ola. Its inspiration is Uber.
Courtesy: Newsx

Do you find any other analogies missing here? Comment below. I’d love to hear from you :)

Love,
Pd.

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Pradyumna Madan Dinni
Pradyumna Madan Dinni

Written by Pradyumna Madan Dinni

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