This time in our annual edition focusing on the movies and its superstars, instead of focussing squarely on Bollywood, we have narrowed the spotlight down to four industries in South India—Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada—for a couple of reasons. Read on, and subscribe to Forbes India to get early access to our inaugural South celebrity special issue
Clockwise: Nayanthara, Dulquer Salmaan, and Yash
Earlier this year, in his column for Forbes India on the future of the entertainment industry in 2021, Siddharth Roy Kapur, founder of Roy Kapur Films, made an interesting observation. He said that in the wake of the first Covid-19 wave in the country, Hindi films being screened in theatres in the first quarter of 2021 saw a tepid response, with single-digit occupancies of 5 to 7 percent, going up to 30 percent in rare cases. There was just one exception to the rule: Southern states, where occupancies varied between 30 and 100 percent.
Tamil film Master, starring Vijay, ran to packed houses even in movie theatres despite after arriving on an OTT platform. Telugu film Uppena did good business, while Kannada film Roberrt raked in nearly Rs 60 crore on its four-day opening weekend alone, Roy Kapur said. “Film industries in the South have managed to instill a confidence that had begun to wane in producers and filmmakers alike,” he wrote.
Even along the way this year, as theatres in Maharashtra remained shut for longer and Covid-19 related curbs affected Hindi-speaking markets, big-budget films in the Hindi film industry started deferring release dates. Examples include Rohit Shetty directorial Sooryavanshi, starring Akshay Kumar, Ranveer Singh, Ajay Devgan and Katrina Kaif; and 83, a film on the Indian cricket team’s historic 1983 World Cup victory, headlined by Ranveer Singh and directed by Kabir Khan. In contrast, the Telugu industry, which is the second biggest industry in India after Hindi in terms of number of film releases every year, saw as many as 125 theatrical releases so far in 2021 despite the pandemic, according to an October 7 report in The Hindu.
One of our columnists in this edition, entertainment industry tracker Sreedhar Pillai, points out that South India has among the highest theatre-going audiences in the country. While that might seem to have limited significance in the emergence of the OTT era, the strong-rooted fan bases that South-Indian film industries enjoy in their respective regions, has kept the spirit of and excitement for cinema alive, both on the big screen whenever possible, and in OTT.
When it comes to OTT, our other columnist, filmmaker Anjali Menon, says that the South, particularly the Malayalam film industry, has had a much quicker response to the pandemic compared to other industries including Hindi. This ranges from adapting to different ways of filmmaking given restrictions, to coming up with experimental, interesting ‘Covid-cognisant’ narratives.
(This story appears in the 22 October, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)