Three months before Slumdog Millionaire began its awards-season journey, former Miramax and Warner Independent president Mark Gill gave his infamous ‘Yes, The Sky Really is Falling’ speech at the L.A. Film Festival's Financing Conference. Setting a tone that would prove eerily prophetic in the wake of the global recession to come a few weeks later, Gill lamented the gutting of the indie film industry that began earlier that winter with the dissolving of several specialty divisions of the major studios, including Paramount Vantage, New Line Cinema and his own Warner Independent. Given Paramount Vantage's success with 2008 Academy Award winners There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men and New Line Cinema's versatility as a studio that could reach art house audiences with Terrence Malick and David Cronenberg films, open blockbusters such as Rush Hour 3 (2007), and bridge commercial and critical success with Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, such a trend demonstrated the dire situation of the industry. Two years after releasing the hit documentary March of the Penguins (2005) and George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), Gill found himself speaking to an audience of independent film producers with Slumdog Millionaire slated to go direct to DVD via Warner Bros. rather than on the books as his division's most successful release (it eventually sold to Fox Searchlight). Though Gill was not entirely apocalyptic – he correctly foresaw Netflix's role in niche entertainment and heralded a growing market interest in specialty films from Baby Boomers – he succinctly outlined the state of the industry: ‘We're entering an era where the only films with any chance for success will be the $100 million-plus tentpoles, and reasonably priced films of some perceived quality.’

As Gill predicted, that era is here and has significant implications for postcolonial filmmakers and the interfidelity approach. With the obvious exception of Gunga Din, the films under discussion in this project were all released between 1996 and 2008, a period that spans the rise of the global indie in film culture and the heyday of mini major and specialty division studios whose last gasp was the accidental blockbuster release of Slumdog.