Srishti Behl Arya joins Phantom Films as CEO

She worked at Netflix for three years before she decided to put down her papers.

On 20 May 2021, we reported that Srishti Behl Arya moved on from Netflix. She was working as the Director-International Original Film. According to a Times of India report, she has joined Phantom Films as CEO.

She had joined Netflix in May 2018 and reported to Monika Shergill. Prior to Netflix, Srishti was an independent producer in the Indian film and television industry.

During her stint at Netflix, Arya had spoken at afaqs!' vdonxt sessions over the years. In February 2020, she spoke at the Vdonxt session offline - where she was interviewed on stage by the contributing editor to Business Standard - Vanita Kohli-Khandekar.

"India is unique in that at least 70 per cent of our members watch at least one film a week, which is far more than any (market) globally. We do have an affinity towards films. We get a lot of feedback, consistently, about what people are watching," she said during the discussion.

She added that there are few surprises, some disappointments, but some things can turn out better than expected. "It's not just about how they are received, it's also about how they're intended. On a 'reception' level, our movie Upstarts (about the startup scene in India) saw a less than optimum result, to my mind. Then there are films like Drive (Hindi film that stars Sushant Singh Rajput and Jacqueline Fernandez) that get heavily criticised but the viewing is incredible," she mentioned.

By the time March 2021 had rolled by, it was time for the next edition of Vdonxt in a new avatar - virtually, on Zoom. Over a video call, Janine Stein, the editorial head at Content Asia, interviewed Arya in an effort to find out more about what drives her.

Arya explained to Stein that each Netflix viewer receives personalised recommendations, and people were becoming more curious about content in different languages, different types of stories, films from different parts of the country. During the pandemic, we’ve seen that people have tried a lot of different things, including films from all over the world.

Last year, Ludo, which was our biggest comedy film last year was viewed by more than half our members and Gunjan Saxena was our most viewed drama film – which was somewhat unexpected.