How Slumdog made millionaires

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Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – based on Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A and the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? quiz show – has made a fortune for its British backers.

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – based on Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A and the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? quiz show – has made a fortune for its British backers. It cost just £8.7 million to make and by late February it had already taken £21 million at the UK box office, and $91 million globally. And that was before it won eight Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards in Los Angeles – a feat that some film industry observers say could double its global box-office takings, pushing up UK takings alone by £9 million.

Oscars boost a film’s profitability by extending the length of time the film will be shown in cinemas as well as increasing the number of screens it will be shown on. Add to this revenue from DVD sales, TV licensing and internet streaming, and Slumdog is set to rake in many millions more.

The majority of the film’s funding was put up by Celador Films, an arm of the television company that owns the rights to Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Celador Films invested £7 million. Film4, the movie arm of the public-service broadcaster Channel 4 and the original buyer of the film rights to the novel, put up £1.5 million. The rest came from the EU’s MEDIA programme, Pathé Films and Fox Searchlight.

But before the film proved to be a major box office hit, it very nearly missed out on the big screen altogether. In the summer of 2008, US distribution rights to the film had been secured by Warner Independent Pictures, a division of Warner Bros. The American studio was anxious about the film’s prospects and considered releasing it in the US straight to DVD, rather than in cinemas. But luckily for the British investors, 50 per cent of the rights were sold on to Fox Searchlight, which decided to release the film in cinemas. The rest, as they say, is history.

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