In case you guys have been living under a rock recently, the highly anticipated multilingual Indian film, ‘Jagame Thandhiram’ dropped on Netflix yesterday… and it had a reception closer to Nani’s 25th film – ‘V’s’ direct-to-OTT release on Amazon Prime Video than Suriya’s ‘Soorarai Pottru’ premiere on Amazon Prime Video. All three films aforementioned were the first direct-to-OTT releases for the film’s leading men – Dhanush, Nani and Suriya – all of which released within 12 months, but only one film out of three managed to get an overwhelming positive response (‘Soorarai Pottru’). ‘Jagame Thandhiram’ was the biggest Tamil movie to drop this year, and it is safe to say that it has failed to live up to the hype. This will severely impact Netflix negatively, with their Tamil OTT releases.
Netflix has been known for bringing some brilliant Tamil films over the past 12 months (during the pandemic). While Amazon Prime Video was targeting the Telugu film industry (and the Malayalam film industry more recently) to get more and more filmmakers to release their movies on their platform, Netflix has been doing the same with the Tamil film industry. Of course, we do manage to get a few Tamil films streaming on Amazon Prime, along with a few Telugu films on Netflix, but this has largely been the norm. With brilliant movies like ‘Mandela’, ‘Paava Kadhaigal’ and ‘Aelay’ managing to release directly on Netflix, it looked like more and more Tamil movies were heading towards direct to OTT releases.
But the audience response for ‘Jagame Thandhiram’ will now “stay” the hands of many Tamil film producers who were planning to opt for direct-to-OTT releases. Or, at the very least, give them pause. Similar to how ‘V’s’ response stopped many big budget Telugu films from releasing on the OTT platform, we expect a similar reaction could happen with this film’s premiere. Of course, Amazon Prime Video’s successful release of ‘Soorarai Pottru’ and ‘Master’ tells us that big budget Tamil films can still work on OTT platforms. But the fact that Netflix was not able to replicate similar success with a Dhanush starrer is quite troubling.
Amazon Prime Video and Netflix have been releasing Tamil movies on the OTT platform. But only the Tamil films ‘Soorarai Pottru’ and ‘Master’ (not direct release, but still a quick transitioned release) which are big-budgeted have managed to hit big. And these movies streamed on Amazon Prime Video.
Jagane Thandhiram was the first big-budget Tamil film running on Netflix and that looks to have flopped hard if we go by the social media response and critics.
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