Fourteen months after striking a partnership with Anil Ambani’s Reliance Big Entertainment, the new DreamWorks Studios, run by Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider, announced on Monday that it had completed financing arrangements to resume making movies.

The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group has sealed its $825-million deal with Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios with investment banker JP Morgan syndicating $325 million debt, the two groups announced on Monday.
Anil Ambani’s Reliance Big Entertainment has matched the syndicated debt raised from JP Morgan and institutions like Bank of America, City National Bank, Wells Fargo, Comerica, Union Bank of California, SunTrust, California Bank and Trust and Israel Discount Bank.
This apart, Walt Disney Studios that will handle the marketing and distribution of films made by DreamWorks in markets outside India, is also extending a loan for the project, a statement from the studio said.
“This will allow us to move ahead quickly into production with our first group of films,” Spielberg was quoted as saying in the statement, along with his long-time associate and partner in the project Stacey Snider.
The studio intends to make five to six films each year.

Last year’s financial collapse tested both Spielberg’s bankability, and the willingness of his Indian partner to weather what has proved to be an extremely difficult period for those starting new Hollywood enterprises.

“We just let it go, without knowing what would happen,” Ambani, chairman of Reliance Big Entertainment told the New York Times of his decision to maintain a commitment to Spielberg through months when debt financing was slow to materialize.

Although the deal, which was announced last year, has been characterized as “Hollywood meets Bollywood“, Spielberg and Snider will have creative control over productions.

The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group ranks among India’s top three industrial houses with interests in areas including telecommunications, energy, finance, entertainment and infrastructure development.
The group’s entertainment business owns 428 cinema screens across India, the US, Malaysia and Mauritius, contributing 11 percent to the domestic industry’s box office collections and 35 percent from the Hindi movies screened in the US.
Its entertainment business has its presence across several platforms, including FM radio, music, sports, gaming, animation, Internet and mobile portals, direct-to-home TV, Internet TV and mobile TV.
Last year, it also entered into pacts to develop Hollywood projects with firms of such stars as Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey and George Clooney.