Vikram Vedha, the most recent Bollywood adaptation of a southern hit directed by the creators of the Tamil original, debuted in theatres in September to positive reviews. Additionally, it is one of only a select few Bollywood movies that have made more than one billion rupees ($12.1 million; £10.7 million) globally this year (though reports say the movie is still struggling to reach that figure in India).
However, several online forums also started vehemently criticizing Bollywood’s seeming inability to come up with original ideas – and its excessive reliance on the south for screenplays – around the time of Vikram Vedha’s debut.
The practice of reviving, recasting, and recreating popular films for fresh audiences is widespread in the global cinema industry. This year, four of the best picture Oscar nominees—including the eventual winner, Coda, which was adapted from a 2014 French film—were remakes or reboots of prior movies.
Bollywood also enjoys remakes. According to a Mint newspaper investigation, one in every three popular movies released between 2000 and 2019 were remakes, installments in a series, or both. And the majority of prominent Bollywood actors, like Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar, have appeared in successful remakes of films from the south.
However, as the business struggles following the epidemic, some believe the time for the remake trend may be running out. Due to the epidemic, more people become subscribers to streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, opening up a world of non-Hindi films for individuals curious about other languages’ media.
Bollywood still has a lot of opportunities to do it right because several southern remakes are in development, including one of the popular Tamil films Soorarai Pottru, which is presently available on Amazon Prime Video. In November, the sequel to the suspenseful Malayalam thriller Drishyam will be released.
It’s not that OTT reach is so vast that it will affect how well a film impacts.
