Cinerea Films expands founding team, eyes feature films and streaming originals

Mumbai: A decade spent bashing out brand films has bought Cinerea Films the right to dream bigger. The Mumbai production house has formally expanded its founding team, with Sumukh Tawde and Rohan Patil joining as co-founders alongside Rohit Mhatre, who built the company from scratch in 2016. Between them, the trio bring more than three decades of combined experience across production, content development and brand strategy, and a shared hunch that India’s best stories remain stubbornly untold.

The numbers behind the pivot are not trivial: Cinerea has delivered more than 250 brand films for upward of 60 clients spanning FMCG, automotive, real estate, hospitality, fashion and luxury, building campaigns for the likes of HUL, Honda, Tanishq, Reliance Digital, ITC, Sterling Holidays, Tata Trusts and Maruti Suzuki. With creative development, production and marketing now sitting under one roof for the first time, the studio is stretching into feature films, streaming originals and original IP development, while keeping its advertising business as a thriving core vertical rather than a relic to be retired.

The expanded line-up has clear divisions of labour. Mhatre takes charge of production and original media, having already produced two Marathi feature films including Punashcha Hari Om, widely viewed on ZEE5 and Zee Talkies. Tawde steers content and creative development, drawing on a decade across cinema, television, OTT and digital that included a stint on the team that launched ZEE5 and leadership of shows across Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. Patil rounds out the trio on strategy and growth, having launched five television channels, sports IPs and film campaigns across Zee Entertainment and Viacom18, picking up multiple industry golds including CMO Asia along the way.

The thesis driving the restructure is that content, marketing and distribution have stopped being separate conversations, and Cinerea wants to be the studio that thinks, creates, markets and measures all of it under one roof. The expanded founding team will now lead growth initiatives, institutional entertainment partnerships and an active development pipeline of original IPs spanning languages and platforms, with further announcements on the slate expected in the coming months.

Ten years of nailing the thirty-second brief have earned Cinerea its shot at the feature-length one; whether Mumbai’s newest full-stack studio can make audiences sit through the credits is the story it’s now writing for itself.