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Coming soon to a cinema screen near you: the edgy, over-the-top humour made famous by All India Bakchod, the comedians who outrageously mock everyone, including themselves.
The comedy quartet of Rohan Joshi, Tanmay Bhat, Gursimran Khamba and Ashish Shakya on Wednesday unveiled plans to venture into feature films and have patrons rolling in the aisles of cinemas.
The group sees this as the natural progression to its success on the web, where it has a huge fan base — 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube, 1.53 million followers on Twitter and 2 million likes on Facebook — and on TV with the news comedy show ‘On Air with AIB’.
“The idea is to produce fiction on the web, and venture into feature films for the box office as well by the end of this year,” Bhat told BusinessLine here on the sidelines of a meet-and-greet session for fans before YouTube FanFest.
“We want to make commercially successful, critically acclaimed movies. And we don’t think the two are mutually exclusive,” Joshi adds.
Not just comedy While the group’s USP is comedy, it is looking at other genres such as thriller, drama too. “We are working on scripts now. Hopefully, by the end of this year, some projects will take shape and we will make an announcement then,” Bhat says.
The team has also embarked on creating a talent pool with ‘First Draft’, its writers’ residency training programme. “Ten aspiring writers are being trained to write fiction content. Hopefully, if they like working with us, we have this talent to work with for life. The idea is to start with 10 writers; over five years this becomes 50, who in turn influence many more,” Bhat says.
The team thinks that this exercise will be a learning experience for when they start their writing school, a long-cherished dream of AIB.
As far as the funding for movies is concerned, Bhat says, “We’ve been lucky enough to now have access to producers and distributors, studio heads, if we want to. For us, we want to be producers… we think this is the golden era of content in India.”
Knockout punch What really got the group into living room debates was ‘AIB Knockout’, the controversial US-style comedy roast of two popular Bollywood actors, for which the Mumbai Police received complaints and an FIR was filed. The video was taken down as well.
Is another roast coming, we ask. “We would love to do another roast. Please feel free to run an ad saying ‘Does anyone want to be roasted?’ We are happy to do it,” Bhat says, tongue firmly in cheek.
Joshi quickly adds, “Why would anyone want to be roasted… after what happened the last time.”
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