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Rana Daggubati has never really stopped rooting for the underdogs. Long before "indie" became a buzzword, he was backing first-time directors and unconventional scripts — the kind of films that don't come with a star cast or a guaranteed opening.
Through his production house, Spirit Media, he's put his weight behind breakouts like Kaantha and more recent titles like Shape of Momo, with his instinct always leaning toward chasing new voices over safe bets. Now, that obsession with indie filmmaking is taking a very literal, brick-and-mortar form.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, Daggubati opened up about his newest venture, a chain of boutique cinemas designed specifically for the kind of films that rarely get mainstream screen time.
He describes the format as intimate by design, mentioning that they are 50 to 80-seater theatres with just two or three screens each, built to feel less like a trip to the mall and more like settling into a favourite coffee shop.
Daggubati said, “The idea is it should feel like a theatre to feel like a coffee shop. So, you don't have this extreme of going parking downstairs, going up a mall. So, we're trying to create the coffee shop type of cinemas, which can allow for a cinema which is not sitting in the mainstream.”
The project, called The Assembly Rooms, is starting in Ooty with a venue named The Assembly Room Zimuti, with a second space already underway in Hyderabad and a couple more planned for Bengaluru.
Rana elaborates, “ We are starting with the first one in Ooty. It's called The Assembly Room Zimuti. That's something that we are working on. The whole project is called The Assembly Rooms. The second one's in Hyderabad that we're building. And Bangalore, we have some one or 2 facilities.”
When asked about Mumbai, he said, "Mumbai, real estate, very expensive. So, I think that would be the last of the cycles." In the meantime, he's got something more immediate lined up: through September, an outdoor cinema will run a steady rotation of alternative Telugu films alongside audience Q&As.
Rana Daggubati's production banner, Spirit Media, is making its Hindi film debut with an adaptation of Aravind Adiga's acclaimed novel Last Man in Tower, starring Manoj Bajpayee and Divya Dutta.