Sujoy Ghosh’s mystery thriller movie ‘Jaane Jaan’ is finally streaming on the Netflix OTT platform from today. As you all know, the film is an on-screen Indian adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s cult 2005 Japanese crime mystery novel ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’. But did you know that this is not the first time the novel has been adapted for the screen, not just by foreign filmmakers, but an Indian one too?
After the award-winning novel was published in the year 2005, ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ was first adapted for the screen in a Japanese film titled ‘Suspect X’. Although the film was a critical and commercial success in Japan, it didn’t receive much attention in other countries probably because it wasn’t marketed as aggressively in international territories.
Four years later, South Korean actress Bang-Eun-jin made a film called ‘Perfect Number’ based on the book and it was released in 2012. However, not many people outside of South Korea have watched the film.
Thereafter, in 2017, a Chinese film bearing the exact same name ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ was released. But like the previous adaptations, this one too did well domestically but couldn’t make a big impact globally.
Some of you might be surprised to know that there is an Indian film too which was somewhat inspired by the book ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’. And the film’s name is ‘Kolaigaran’ starring Vijay Antony, Arjun and Ashima Narwal in the lead roles. When it was released in cinemas in 2019, ‘Kolaigaran’ mostly received positive feedback from critics and audiences. The film is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
All of the aforementioned on-screen adaptations of Keigo Higashino’s novel ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ have one thing in common: They tasted success in their own countries but couldn’t make a similarly strong impact among international audiences in a big way.
Will that change with Sujoy Ghosh’s ‘Jaane Jaan’? Yes, it can. Because of one simple reason: the proliferation of local OTT content across the globe among foreign audiences and vice versa. And since Netflix is such a popular streaming service in so many countries, if ‘Jaane Jaan’ receives a big thumbs-up by OTT viewers and starts trending globally on Netflix, then there are decent chances that the Indian adaptation of ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ could create a much larger impact on global audiences compared to its predecessors. Let’s keep our fingers crossed until then.