Bollywood has been making remakes of south films from a long time. As per reports, currently, there are at least 15-20 South Indian films which are in various stages of being remade in Hindi. It has been noticed that many of the last few south remakes have been outright rejected by the audiences. Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma has spoken up about the same issue in the light of 'Jersey' starring actors Shahid Kapoor, Mrunal Thakur and Pankaj Kapur, not doing well at the box-office.
Varma has captured the public's attention with his thoughts on remakes. Taking to twitter, he shared, "The DISASTROUS fate of JERSEY film in Hindi signals the DEATH of REMAKES for the simple reason it has been proved multiple times that dubbed films like #Pushpa #RRR #KGF2 are doing far better than originals if the content is good #DeathOfRemakes (sic)."
Varma went on to add, "If Nani ‘s original JERSEY from Telugu was dubbed and released it would have costed the producers just 10 lakhs whereas the remake in Hindi costed 100 cr resulting in losing enormous money,time, effort and face (sic)."
In his next tweet, he wrote, “After the monstrous successes of dubbed films like #Pushpa , #RRR and #KGF2 , no south film with good content will be sold for remake rights as even both the content and regional stars are being liked by the Hindi audiences #DeathOfRemakes (sic).”
“Bollywood will be now getting ducked from both front and back as they neither seem to know how to make superhits nor can they hope to survive on remaking south films because nobody will sell them REMAKE rights #DeathOfRemakes (sic),” further added Varma.
“Moral of the story is it’s smart to release dubbed films instead of remaking them because it’s obvious that the audiences are ok with any face or any subject from anywhere as long as it interests them #DeathOfRemakes (sic),” he added next in his series of tweets.
Varma concluded his series of tweets with a tongue-in-cheek comment. "TELUGU and KANNADA films have INFECTED Hindi films like a COVID VIRUS..Hoping that BOLLYWOOD will soon come up with a VACCINE (sic)," concluded Varma.
South releases in the past few months, like ‘Pushpa’, ‘RRR’ and ‘KGF: Chapter 2’, released for a Pan-India audience in varied Indian languages. They all managed to take the box-office by storm. In this year, the only few Hindi films that have done good business are ‘The Kashmir Files’, which also didn’t have any big star, and ‘Gangubai Kathiawadi’ headlined by actress Alia Bhatt.
Now, actor Ranveer Singh and director S Shankar have teamed up to remake 'Anniyan' (Tamil). The 'Great Indian Kitchen' (Malayalam), 'Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo' (Telugu), 'Driving License' (Malayalam), 'Vikram Vedha' (Tamil), 'Soorarai Pottru' (Tamil), actress Samantha's 'U-Turn' ( Tamil, Telugu) and 'Ratsasan' (Tamil) are just a few of the south remakes that are currently under production in Hindi.
