After signing co-production deals with China, Trinity Pictures, the film production arm of India’s distribution giant Eros International, is also scouting for opportunities with Turkish and Russian production houses.

The company, which recently rolled out its first film Sniff , said it will be looking to create character-driven franchises. Trinity plans to create merchandise, games, animations and digital properties around such films.

“Our aim is to first create a character which can be leveraged on and monetised by creating a pipeline of properties around it. Our in-house team works on creating the content. This way the intellectual property lies with us,” Ajit Thakur, CEO, Trinity Pictures told BusinessLine.

Trinity’s Sniff targets children. “We have already undertaken various merchandising tie-ups,” he added.

To begin with, Trinity tied up with Diamond Comics, the publisher of popular comic book series Chacha Chaudhary, to release a new comic series called Sunny Gill & the Agents of Sniff.

Thakur claimed that over three lakh copies of the same has been sold across five languages.

It also entered into an agreement with The Souled Store which has a t-shirt merchandising pact with Marvel and other studios in India and also released a game in association with Raj Kundra-promoted Viaan Industries.

“We tie-up with companies which develop the final product of the IPs that we own,” he added.

Thakur said Eros is looking at a slate of five to seven films with budgets ranging from about a million to up to $20 million. He said the company is also looking across genres such as horror, kids, detective, wildlife and Indo-Chinese production.

“We are also looking co-production opportunities in Russia. We already have tie-up with Chinese and Turkish production houses,” he added

These productions will be helmed by directors such as Kabir Khan, Siddharth Anand, Amole Gupte and Tamil director Prabhu Solomon.

With China’s Peacock Mountain Culture & Media and state-owned Huaxia Film Distribution, Trinity will produce Kabir Khan’s travel drama The Zookeeper and Siddharth Anand’s Love in Beijing.

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