It’s December! Time for year-end lists, statistics and what have you, from all prominent content aggregation platforms. Google, Twitter and now IMDb have all released their year end lists for what trended in this year that is days away from coming to a close.
IMDb India released its lists of the top movies and TV shows in India on the basis of its own ranking system. The Top 10 movies in Indian cinema, as per IMDb are as follows –
10. Haseen Dillruba
9. Drishyam 2
8. Shiddat
7. Karnan
6. Mimi
5. Sardar Udham
4. Master
3. Sooryavanshi
2. Shershaah
1. Jai Bhim
Admittedly, the IMDb Top 10 Films Of 2021 in India list does complete justice to the quality of films released this year, both in theatres and on OTT. Suriya‘s Jai Bhim in particular totally deserves landing the top spot as the best film of the year.
However, one thing that stands out rather glaringly from this list is the fact that not a single film from the Telugu film industry made it into the top 10. Tollywood is the largest film industry in India after Bollywood. In terms of the number of films it churns out, it is bigger than even Bollywood. Yet, not a single Telugu film made it to the IMDb Top 10 Of 2021. To put it in numbers, there are 6 Hindi films in the Top 10, 3 Tamil films, and 1 film from the Malayalam film industry.
This simply demonstrates the lacklustre year that the Telugu film industry has had this year. Though there were some good Telugu releases in the form of Krack, Jathi Ratnalu, Vakeel Saab, Mail, Uppena, Cinema Bandi, Tuck Jagadish, Republic, among others, none was popular or good enough to make it into the top 10.
The Telugu film industry has contributed some really good films to Indian cinema in the past. But looks like standards are falling consistently in the past few years. Kollywood has overtaken Tollywood in the quality and scale of films. Let’s hope the Telugu film industry regains its glory in 2022 with big films such as RadheShyam, RRR and Sarkaru Vaari Paata lined up for release next year.