Sandalwood AKA the Kannada film industry has been producing and releasing brilliant films lately, but they continue to struggle in gaining the attention of the various OTTs streaming in India. With the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic having come and gone, the second wave seems to be affecting the South Indian film industry the same way, with more and more Kannada projects being released by streaming platforms. On the other hand, Mollywood, who like Sandalwood had been struggling in garnering OTT attention for months, have managed to catch the eye of some big players including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
Previously, the most in-demand South Indian films for OTT were from the Telugu and Tamil film industries. But it looks like the Malayalam film industry has joined their ranks in 2021. The first Kannada film to release on OTT was the brilliant road mystery thriller, ‘U-Turn’, which was released back in 2016. In comparison, the first Malayalam film to get a direct-to-OTT release was ‘Sufiyum Sujathayum’ on Amazon Prime Video last year, which only happened because of the coronavirus pandemic. This quick turn-around has been highly shocking especially since Sandalwood had at least 3 years of “OTT interest-generation” over Mollywood.
With multiple small and medium budget films from both languages looking for an OTT platform for streaming, many filmmakers from both Sandalwood and Mollywood struggled for attention during the lockdown. However with the success of ‘C U Soon’ which was followed by the hype and eventual success of Mohanlal’s ‘Drishyam 2’, OTTs like ZEE5, Netflix, Aha Video, Amazon Prime Video among others have been rushing to Malayalam filmmakers for their movies.
According to ‘U-Turn’ director Pawan Kumar, this issue is due to an unfortunate disproportionate number of OTT subscribers within Karnataka. The capital city, Bengaluru, reports one of the highest subscriptions and views within the country. This is kind of quite jarring, since the rest of Karnataka has very low subscription rates, in comparison. But, even in Bengaluru, most of the subscribers from said city do not demand for Kannada content, but they do watch very varied content ranging from international to hyped-up regional content. As long as there is buzz following content, these subscribers do not discriminate. Since most of the Kannada content goes under-radar from an OTT perspective, there is rarely much demand for the content from the Bengaluru (or the rest of the state) subscribers.
That is not to say that Sandalwood hasn’t improved. Kannada films featuring megastars and/ or brilliant directors are still in demand by OTTs. With Sandalwood creating films like ‘Hero’, ‘K.G.F: Chapter 1’, ‘Act 1978’, ‘Kavaludaari’ among others, in recent years, the future of this film industry is indeed very bright. As the film industry continues to make good films, each film will add to the hype of the rising film industry, which will attract more viewers. As more people become interested in the films, more people will demand for the film to release on their favourite OTTs. And this will be how Sandalwood films will become a mainstay among streaming platforms.
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