The corporate connection in Bollywood is not going to fizzle out with Madhur Bhandarkar?s latest film. Gone are the days when a bank or a company chipping in for a commercial movie would make national news. These days it?s difficult to imagine a film that doesn?t have a Percept Picture Company or Adlabs Films or Sahara One tucked away somewhere.

And this corporate-creative marriage is entering a new phase in tinsel town. The biggest of film corporations are now signing up the biggest of movie directors for multiple projects. And this despite these directors themselves heading smaller companies.

So you have an Adlabs Films signing Ram Gopal Varma for 10 films at a cost Rs 100 crore to be produced in the next two years. Now, Ramu himself may not be directing all the movies himself and would have his Factory makers dishing out the movies for Adlabs. As Adlabs Films chairman-cum-managing director Manmohan Shetty tells The Telegraph: ?Actually all the film-makers that we have tied up with have their own production houses. This brings in more synergy as they will work as line producers. We will shortlist the subjects together and they will produce it on behalf of Adlabs.?

Apart from Varma, Adlabs has signed up Vipul Shah for 12 films for Rs 210 crore over three years, Prakash Jha for five films at a cost of Rs 80 crore over two years and Rohan Sippy for three films at a cost of Rs 20 crore over two years.

Isn?t this like jumping the gun in an industry that rises or falls with every Friday? ?As an entertainment conglomerate we need to be producing around 10 films a year and so we are looking at around 30 films over a period of two to three years,? explains Shetty. ?And entertainment needs planning since it?s a long process from deciding the script to talking to the proposed cast for blocking dates to finalising the crew to pre-production, production, post-production and then the release itself.?

And it?s not just Adlabs. You have Sahara One signing up Madhur Bhandarkar for three films, Anubhav Sinha making six films for Percept Picture Company, Sanjay Gupta?s White Feather Films delivering one film every six months for Ektaa Kapoor?s Balaji Films. Even the brother and sister team of Saif Ali Khan and Soha Ali Khan are planning to get into production by making movies for Balaji.

So why this sudden switch of sides for these film-makers from independent financiers to corporate houses. ?Smooth flow of structured finance,? says director Sujoy Ghosh, whose two films Jhankaar Beats and Home Delivery have been produced by Pritish Nandy Communications and Percept Picture Company. The technical jargon Ghosh uses has to do with the eight years he spent as a Reuters business correspondent.

?When you make a film with a corporate house, you work on a specified budget and a specified deadline and that helps the film to be made at a certain cost and within a certain time,? Sujoy adds. ?Also, with their corporate set-up the creative interference is nil. At least I was lucky that I had complete creative independence. No wonder it is the Hollywood model to make movies.?