Hombale Films' Vijay Kiragandur and Karthik Gowda developed a handbook for their future projects, with dictums that drew as much from their past failures as from success. |
IN 2013, a brand new production house backed Puneeth Rajkumar-starrer Ninnindale, a US-set love story. They gave it their all — roping in a good cast and a sound technical crew, but ended up losing 30 percent of their investment when the film tanked. Cut to 2022, and that same production house has had two films that have raked in combined box office earnings pegged at Rs 1,600 crore as per trade estimates. The films are KGF 2 and Kantara, and the production house is the Bengaluru-based Hombale Films.
Hombale Films is led by first cousins Vijay Kiragandur (46) and Karthik Gowda (35), along with their partner Chaluve Gowda (47). After a misfire like Ninnindale, any other small production house would have disintegrated. But Hombale regrouped. They’d already decided to produce the Yash-starrer Masterpiece; all of their learnings from Ninnindale were put into that. Masterpiece released in December 2015 and worked well at the box office. Eight years and multiple blockbusters later, the reticent Vijay tells Subha J Rao that not much has changed in the way Hombale does business.
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