The recent Hindi adaptation of the 2017 Tamil movie Vikram Vedha, has been under the spotlight for a multitude of reasons, ranging from its stellar cast to the massive popularity that it originally got in the South.
But, with the trend of mass viewership of South Indian movies all over India, the Hindi adaptation may not garner as many viewers as expected, as originality is always a key aspect of the success of any movie. The viewers look for stories and tales that they have never seen before and thus, the idea of remaking deviates from the concept of never-heard-tales.
What I wish to convey here is that the audience is already familiar with the main content and plot of the movie and therefore, many people do not prefer watching the same story with a different cast and language.
Vikram Vedha is not the only film that has seen its Bollywood adaptation, as many films like OK Kanmani (remade as OK Jaanu), Bhaagamathi (recreated as Durgamathi), Jersey (remade with the same name) were also made again into Bollywood mainstream movies. But this obsession of Bollywood to remake popular South Indian movies also comes with certain limitations and obstacles to overcome.
The preconceived perception of the audience is one of the most significant problems with South Indian film adaptations into Bollywood. With the experience of watching the original movie, the audience decides to watch its adaptation with a critical mindset rather than a neutral one. There are only a few films like Kabir Singh (a remake of Arjun Reddy) or Wanted (a remake of the film of the same name starring Mahesh Babu) that had the fortune of earning good audience reviews. Kabir Singh, in particular, was subjected to more negative reviews than was its original and was considered misogynistic by the progressive section of the audience. Whereas, the other remakes succumb to harsh comparison with their original adaptation because it would be in the rarest of a case that people would regard a remake as better or even as equal to its original.
According to a media consulting firm Ormax Media, in the cumulative years of 2020 and 2021, the Telugu film industry had a share of 29 percent at the box office, as compared to 27 percent for Hindi movies. While box office collection only indicates how a particular film is better than other movies, there are other reasons south Indian movies like Pushpa, KGF, and RRR became so popular among Indians whereas Hindi films like Shamshera or Bachchan Pandey couldn’t enjoy the same popularity. The popular dialogues, and the raw emotions which made the movies relevant to the mass population along with the social media trends that they introduced to its viewers, made the South Indian movies more likable than the mainstream Hindi movies.
In a nutshell, it is okay until the Hindi movies are inspired by south movies, but once it gets influenced and copy or remake movies from the South; it is prone to audience dissatisfaction, criticism, harsh comparisons and as a whole, all these are slowly loosening the grip that Bollywood had over its ardent viewers.