Many of you might have noticed by now, the first ever Malayalam superhero film, ‘Minnal Murali’, released on Netflix last week… And it is a critical success. And according to Netflix, the film has made it to the top 10 global popular global releases as well. And it is not such a huge surprise. Besides India, the film has become hugely popular in countries like Bahrain, Bangladesh, Kuwait, Maldives, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Qatar, Sri Lanka, and UAE. So after a tentative International success, is ‘Minnal Murali’ Netflix’s first step to introduce popular Indian content to the International market?
Of course, ‘Minnal Murali’ isn’t the only Netflix content that went on to become popular in the international market. ‘Sacred Games’ and ‘Little Things’ are a couple of brilliant Indian shows that have proved to be popular in the Indian market. However, the success of ‘Minnal Murali’ has done something new for the Indian International OTT space – a non-Hindi direct-to-OTT released content has become popular at the International stage. While we are not calling the film, ‘Squid Game’ – the film has helped in pointing out to the rest of the world that Indian cinema is not Bollywood alone.
Netflix has been dropping promo after, even resorting to multiple promos per day on multiple other channels to promote the film as much as possible. This has only continued even after the film has been released – not with the same intensity, however. This kind of backing from the OTT platform bodes well for future Indian projects and we expect Netflix to concentrate on more Indian releases in 2022 – particularly the South Indian ones. 2022 should be the year of Indian cinema in the International Netflix space – similar to how South Korea dominated the same digital space earlier this year. However, we will have to wait and see for now.
Check out ‘Minnal Murali’ on Netflix.