How experience enhanced Akshay Bardapurkar's AB-ility!

Videos and trailers getting a million likes in 24 hours is commonplace, but Planet Marathi’s Akshay Bardapurkar has been deluged with offers from Marathi filmmakers to stream their film on his soon to be launched digital platform.

Despite the launch is still a few weeks away, the platform has been swamped with offers to upload films on his exclusive OTT platform for Marathi content. “It is like when you go upstream you have to swim against the current. I had to put my own film AB Aani CD starring Amitabh Bachchan and Vikram Gokhale as the film was being unable to stay in the theatres due to the corona scare and the subsequent lockdown. Experience is now what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you and hence I decided to start my own platform,” says Bardapurkar with a degree of nonchalance.

Not surprising that many Marathi filmmakers have directly approached us for premiering their films while others have approached us through content agencies. Bardapurkar is also looking at creating exclusive web shows as well as films in the right budgets.

Bardapurkar who is the founder-CMD of the platform is also an established film producer with two other films in the pipeline in various stages of production. While his other film Goshta Ek Paithanichi starring Sayali Sanjeev and Milind Gunaji is on the edit table at the moment, he has announced his next Chandramukhi which is based on Vishwas Patil’s novel. The filmmaker feels that the confluence of cultures and the similarity of stories from the subcontinent with many other countries will help the growth of the content.

“Apart from that since we are an OTT, we are also looking at subtitling and dubbing all films and series in other languages especially Latin as it is extensively spoken in South America and they have a similar culture like ours. The stories and the demographics are the same. They love their movies and entertainment and even if they don't have enough money to eat, they will spend a significant amount on entertainment like how we do,” explains Bardapurkar. Clearly ruling out any non-Marathi content except dubbed ventures in the future, Bardapurkar says that the culturally strong Marathi content will get a chance to go global because of OTT.

“It is a chance for us to make Marathi global. I think it is time that we go over the top in doing that," he enthuses.