BookMyShow partners Disney to bring ‘Aladdin’ stage musical in India

After dominating entertainment and movie ticketing platform for over a decade, BookMyShow has been facing serious competition from Alibaba-backed Paytm for past couple of years.

Meanwhile, exploring other avenues for scale and revenue, the  Ashish Hemrajani-led company has forayed into audio entertainment with Jukebox in June last year.

The Mumbai-based company has now partnered with Disney to produce the local version of globally popular stage musical for Aladdin in India. The partnership would be based on a licensing model.

BookMyShow will own sets, lights, crew, and execution of the musical in India while script and music will be owned by Disney. It claims to maintain the true attributes of the Broadway format and will be crafted for the local audience.

The first show of the globally popular stage musical will be rolled out in coming April and held at National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai.

BookMyShow has been organising live music concerts and gigs for over two years. Importantly, the revenue contribution from non-movie verticals is about 35 per cent. This is the second musical for the entertainment conglomerate in India. Disney also brought Beauty and the Beast in 2015.

Also read: Paytm sold 52 Mn entertainment tickets in 2017, claims 6X growth but how

To spruce up its positioning in music vertical, BookMyShow had acquired on-demand audio and video platform Nfusion for an undisclosed amount in an all-cash-deal. The entertainment ticketing major is leveraging Nfusion’s tech stack to build its audio entertainment vertical.

After establishing its video content vertical, BookMyShow has forayed into audio entertainment by offering ‘Jukebox’.

Launched in June last year, Jukebox has about 1.5 million songs to choose from. The company claims to have a monthly growth of 300 per cent since its launch. Currently, Jukebox doesn’t generate any revenue, however, if the service hits significant scale in the next 6-9 months, BookMyShow will try to monetise it through advertising and sponsorship.

Meanwhile, flush with massive $2.5 billion fresh funds from SoftBank, Flipkart was in talks with BookMyShow for buying a strategic stake in later's late last year. The Bengaluru-based company wants a slice of fledgling OTT sector.

BookMyShow is also shutting down its mobile wallet operations from February 28 onwards. Besides, the online ticketing platform is in advanced discussions with private equity firm TPG Growth to raise around $50-60 million funds.

Netflix, Hotstar and Amazon Prime are major players in video streaming space while Alibaba and Facebook Watch are soon to launch their operations soon.

The development was first reported by Variety.