Bollywood Actors on Cover of Mills & Boon
Sonakshi Sinha and Ranveer Singh, Bollywood actors playing leading roles in movie Lootera, are now on covers of popular romance fiction series Mills & Boon.
Lootera is a period romance set in 1950s Bengal and is slated for a worldwide release on July 25, 2013. Makers of the movie have teamed up with Mills & Boon's publishers, Harlequin India, to promote the movie in a unique style to grab the attention of movie goers. They have released a special edition Mills & Boon - LooteraCollection.
"Lootera is the story of intense love and its various repercussions including happiness, pain and suffering. As the series is known for its romantic content, the marketing team felt it made for a good idea to reach out to a wider audience," said Vikramaditya Motwane, director of Lootera, to Indian media.
Citing a source, The Hindustan Times reports that the books will be released in 5,000 outlets across India later this week. "A note written by Sonakshi, along with the film still, will be inserted in 25 titles of M&B novels in the month of July," according to the source as cited in The Hindustan Times. "It will reflect the love between the characters in the film, keeping in mind the title of each novel."
Country manager of Harlequin India, Manish Singh, sees Bollywood as the cultural face of India. He said, "It's only a natural extension that Bollywood is in some way associated to our novels."
Harlequin is no stranger to Bollywood. The seller of a book every four seconds in the world has a special Bollywood category for its Indian Mills & Boon readers. The Bollywood inspired Mills & Boon series has Bollywood stars as fictional heroes. According to a report in The Economic Times, the Bollywood stars of Mills & Boon are first-gen upstarts and despite achieving success, they are close to the roots.
Inspired by American author O' Henry's The Last Leaf, Lootera is one of the much-awaited Bollywood releases of this year. Director Vikramaditya Motwane's debut movie Udaan was critically acclaimed and expectations are high for his second directorial output. Phantom Films and Balaji Motion Pictures have co-produced the movie. Amit Trivedi has composed Lootera's music.
Mills & Boon Lootera collection is available in two languages, English and Hindi. According to media reports, the pack consists of enchanting love stories by popular authors such as Emma Darcy, Lynne Graham and Penny Jordan. These stories of Mills & Boon have the same depth and intensity of love that Sonakshi Sinha and Ranveer Singh exhibit in Lootera.