From the times when the Indian film industry was claimed to be just Bollywood or Bollywood-centric, it has come to the times when South Indian films took over the reign by delivering internationally successful films including an Oscar win. It is not an exaggeration when the filmmaker from Bollywood looked down on South filmmakers even though the latter constantly gave wonderful films over the years.
In the last few years, South Indian films like Baahubali, Pushpa, KGF, and many others films emerged as supersuccessful commercially in the North as well, while Bollywood could not keep up the success rate as earlier losing the spotlight to South films. There were B-town filmmakers denouncing South films all along, but it has reached to an open debate recently.
In a round table interview, a Telugu film producer ridiculed that Bollywood got stuck with making films for ‘Bandra and Juhu’ which had not gone well with many. Not in the same context, but veteran filmmaker Rakesh Roshan spoke about the success of South Indian films KGF2 and Pushpa 2 and said the South Indian films are not ‘progressing because they are carrying on pertinently with the old-school format of song-action-dialogue-emotions.’ Rakesh Roshan’s comments were ridiculed by many on social media firstly for generalizing and mentioning four major film industries into one word ‘South’ and secondly for the comments he made.
Claiming to have done path-breaking films like Koi Mil Gaya and Krrish after Kahoo Naa Pyaar Hai, Rakesh Roshan tried to generalize the typecasting films in the South while forgetting the fact that Bollywood has been making the so-called old-school template films in a rather poor narrative of late.
Well, it is needless to say that each film industry brings on a ton of monotonous template format films every year, but the B-town filmmakers might have to admit the fact that South film industries are delivering the most number of path-breaking films and also commercially successful films than Bollywood currently.
Apart from that, the formulaic cinema cannot be separated from the Telugu audiences. But the approach, narrative, technicalities, and screenplay are the factors that make each film different and that is where South cinema is being successful while Bollywood is failing in it recently. However, the filmmakers attributing the template filmmaking to South cinema need a retrospection while understanding how films like Amaran, Lucky Baskhar, Sathyam Sundaram, Mathu Vadalara, and Kalki 2898 AD are far from template filmmaking. The list goes on if we have to mention films like Rangasthalam, Kantara, Manam, and Eega.
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