Speaking at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France this week, Priyanka Chopra Jonas said a low-budget horror film changed how she thinks about the entertainment industry.
"I feel like if you have an idea, shoot it, put it on YouTube, and it can become 'Obsession,' the movie that just came out," she told the audience. "What a wonderful time to be an entertainer, to be in the entertainment business, because ideas are your currency."
According to reports from both Variety and Deadline, Chopra Jonas was speaking during a fireside chat with People Inc.'s Leah Wyar on the topics of culture, originality, and what she called "borderless expression." Her comments ranged from the surprise success of her pirate film The Bluff to her roots in Bollywood and her plans for the next phase of her career.
The Bluff, directed by Frank E. Flowers and produced by the Russo brothers alongside Chopra Jonas's Purple Pebble label, topped Prime Video's global movie charts in dozens of countries when it released in late February. Chopra Jonas plays Ercell "Bloody Mary" Bodden, a former pirate living in the Cayman Islands whose violent past catches up with her when her former captain, played by Keith Urban, returns for revenge.
"I was really shocked at how many countries it was number one in because first of all it was a female story about female pirates that most people didn't know existed," she said.
She said the film carried historical weight beyond its action storyline. "It is an action movie and a story, but more than everything [else], there are so many people who learned about what happened during that time with piracy and pirate culture, indenture and servitude from colonization, which was a big part of India's history where people were taken with the promise of better jobs and dropped into different parts of the world," she said.
On the subject of how she selects projects to produce, she said instinct matters more than trend-chasing. "Nobody goes into a movie hoping for it to fail," she said. "The stakes are so high with a lot of time and money involved, and everyone wants it to be successful. You have to follow your gut. I try not to follow trends because that is really hard: A trend that's interesting this week might not be next week."
Chopra Jonas grew up without any connections to the film industry. Her parents were doctors, and she said early in her career she was told that Indian cinema would never reach global audiences because of its non-English-language productions. She credited streaming services and the pandemic for dismantling that assumption. "My mom loves Korean dramas. She would never have had access to those if it wasn't for both of those factors," she said, also citing Squid Game and Parasite as examples of non-English-language content that broke through globally.
She started her production company to help filmmakers who have strong ideas but lack access to the industry. "New filmmakers, or filmmakers who have great ideas but don't have the ability to open doors that I may be able to open," she said, explaining her motivation.
Looking at her own English-language work, she said she has not yet reached the same range she has in Hindi-language films. "In my Hindi-language career, I've worked with all the best filmmakers and the best actors, I've told amazing stories and done a variety of genres. Whereas in America, in Hollywood, in my English-language work, I haven't really done that as much," she said.
One of her next projects is Varanasi, a Telugu-language film directed by S.S. Rajamouli, the director behind RRR and Baahubali: The Beginning. Chopra Jonas stars alongside Mahesh Babu. She called it "a really ambitious movie" and said it is set for release in April 2027. Of Rajamouli, she said, "He has complete and utter control on set."
The film will be dubbed in nearly 200 languages, she said, a detail that fits directly into her broader point about global storytelling no longer requiring an English-language label to find a worldwide audience.
