Who Is The Karan Johar Of The Marathi Entertainment Industry? Sanjay Chhabria is a colossus in the Marathi entertainment industry, popularly known as the Karan Johar of the Marathi industry.
By Kabir Singh Bhandari •
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Sanjay Chhabria is a colossus in the Marathi entertainment industry, popularly known as the Karan Johar of the Marathi industry. He is the founder of Everest Entertainment, by far the largest aggregator of film content to Marathi GEC (General Entertainment Channels), movie channels, music channels, digital and OTT platforms. They have collaborated with Amazon Prime, Reliance Jio, HOOQ, Hungama, Tata Sky and most recently Netflix, and their YouTube channel 'Everest Marathi' has over 2 million subscribers.
"It's an honour. KJO is a big name and known for consistently producing Big Ticket Entertainers. Big shoes to fill in. We at Everest have produced some path breaking films and the set tag only motivates us to do bigger projects. We are all set to reach greater heights with the films planned in our pipeline," Chabbria told us.
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He started Everest in 2003 as a video publishing company and acquired video copyrights of Marathi feature films and released them as VCD's and DVD's. By 2008 they were one of the leading home video distributors of Marathi feature films with the rights of films such as 'Satchyat Aat Gharaat', 'Aga Bai Arrecha', 'Sade Made Teen', 'Valu', 'Matichya Chuli' and many such hit titles.
Around 2006 alongside the video copyrights, they started acquiring the electronic media rights of a lot of Marathi films, one of them being 'Matichya Chuli', produced by Mahesh Manjrekar. That was the beginning of Chhabria's association with Manjrekar, and they went to produce 'Mee Shivajiraje Bhosale Boltoy', (2009) which was a huge success. The game changing steps for Everest came in the form of content aggregation and syndication and later production.
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Future projects involve three Marathi projects (Boyz 4, Thank You, Sorry, I Love You and Mumbai Pune Mumbai 4), two Gujarati Films (Hari Om Hari, Umbaro) and some Bhojpuri projects. Having already diversified into producing Gujarati and Bhojpuri films, they shall soon also be venturing into Punjabi films and also have plans to launch their own Marathi OTT platform.
Fact sheet:
• Number of people employed : 20
• Year of Inception: 2003
• Key customers: Disney, Amazon, Sony, Zee
The author can be reached at bkabir@entrepreneurindia.com and Instagram.com/kabirsinghbhandari
