In the first half of 2025 alone, greater than half a dozen Hindi web reveals have made noise on streaming platforms, from fashionable returning titles like Paatal Lok Season 2 andPanchayat Season 4 to recent makes an attempt like Dabba Cartel, Khauf, Black Warrant, and extra. A slate like this is able to be a dream come true for Tamil cinema, the place solely Suzhal: The Vortex Season 2 stays the sole notable long-form entry this yr. This isn’t an exception, however a continuation of a well-known development over the previous couple of years.
Banking on the success of titles like Suzhal: The Vortex and Vilangu in 2022, streaming platforms doubled down in 2023 with nearly a dozen web collection releases in Tamil. Of them, solely Ayali and Sweet Kaaram Coffee acquired appreciable eyeballs, and in 2024, solely six Tamil titles acquired any recognition from viewers. What are the obstacles to creating a collection in Tamil? Is there a hesitancy amongst Tamil filmmakers in direction of long-form? Can a couple of experiments change the sport?
Are Tamil storytellers hesitant to embrace the longer format?
First and foremost, the consolidation of energy in a star-driven business is a priority for series-making. Producer SR Prabhu believes that solely when stars enable producers to spearhead tasks might the longer format develop into an add-on mission. Producer G Dhananjayan bluntly asserts that large stars wouldn’t do web collection “because they don’t want to be seen continuously.” It impacts their star aura, he says. But the problem isn’t restricted to large names solely. After all, in Tamil, even stars aside from the Big 4 class haven’t gotten a notable web collection in their repertoire; the daring Vijay Sethupathi might need performed a Tamilian in Farzi, however he’s but to make a straight Tamil collection.
Vijay Sethupathi made his Hindi collection debut in ‘Farzi’
Director Pushkar, of the Pushkar-Gayathri duo, believes that extra stars like Aishwarya Rajesh (who acted in his collection Suzhal) will start to see worth in the format over the subsequent few years, when it turns into obvious how some tales can’t be advised in the theatrical format. “Look what a bunch of actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Rajkummar Rao have done in Bollywood. As with cinema, experiments will happen on smaller stories. First, you’ll have certain kind of actors coming in. Then you’ll have certain stars coming in, and then the big stars will come in.” Pushkar factors out how HBO took 10-12 years to get the large stars, or how Netflix couldn’t get many large stars besides Kevin Spacey once they started making authentic collection.
The exhaustive course of to pitching
For now, even when a Sethupathi takes a leap of religion in the format, streaming platforms proceed to wield the management to greenlight tasks. Firstly, producers don’t have a whole lot of say in how a mission will get formed in a streaming platform, as a result of, as Dhananjayan (who labored as Head of Tamil content material for a platform) says, OTTs desire to not work with a third-party producer. “They just want a line producer to execute the project.”
This implies that the platforms retain management over the manufacturing and post-production of a collection. The course of to get a mission greenlit sounds exhausting. “Firstly, directors won’t get two-to-three hours to narrate their pitch; they get two hours at most. Then they receive their feedback, write and send the script, and if approved, translate the script to English so that it goes to the next level,” says Dhananjayan.
The countless means of approvals, Dhananjayan says, are the place writers wrestle lots. “It goes level after level, and everyone needs to approve it without making any changes. Meanwhile, the director or writer struggles financially to maintain the film’s office and the writers’ room.” Even then, there isn’t a certainty if an accredited mission might see the gentle of day. A mission Dhananjayan accredited in 2020 is but to discover a streaming window. “Changes are made to the script, budget discussions keep happening, and then the production happens for a year, following which they take a year more for post-production. Even during post-production, they keep editing and changing the material.”
If such is the course of inside a streaming platform, how are Hindi titles being launched one after the different? “Because with Hindi titles, the teams in Mumbai can relate to the language immediately and make a decision. Here, local teams might help, but even then, it’s slow. The Mumbai team usually has to approve, and they see only the subtitled version. How will they connect with the nuances of South India?” says Dhananjayan.
A collection author’s block
While the hangups with the streaming ecosystem are actual, there’s one other drawback: an absence of writing experience in collection kind. Prabhu blames the lack of studio set-ups for this. “Tamil industry, particularly, is dominated by directors, not writers, which is why the concept of writers’ room isn’t popular here,” he says. Dhananjayan, on the different hand, believes native storytellers are but to domesticate these expertise as a result of they don’t perceive the distinction it shares from a conventional film script.
“Historically, we are all equipped to tell a story in two hours, but the longer format requires multiple stories with a lot of layers and characters building on a story.” The construction of a teleplay isn’t so simple as a screenplay. “In a web series, every 23–24 minutes, they need a peak, a climactic scene. Most people are struggling to write stories that run for 250 minutes across 10 episodes, each 25 minutes long. They can write a 250-minute story, but it won’t have something engaging every 20–30 minutes,” says Dhananjayan.
Pushkar echoes this. “In a film, you will have to go from the first act to the second act, and then you will have a midpoint. That’s where the story takes a turn; now, a series needs a lot of that. In a series, you start an episode with what it is about, but you don’t resolve it in the end; instead, you continue to the next episode. So the techniques differ,” says the Suzhal maker.
Bloated narratives and experiments with codecs
A few weeks in the past, filmmaker Karthik Subbaraj aired his need to re-render his newest Suriya-starrer, Retro, as a restricted collection, an try he believes would discover assist from Netflix. The director revealed that he has many thrilling footage from the movie that didn’t make the closing lower. Filmmakers releasing prolonged cuts isn’t new, and so that you would possibly marvel if that is only a solution to promote all that additional flab that was ignored in the theatrical lower. But Karthik has asserted he isn’t merely inserting deleted scenes; he hopes to restructure the narrative right into a collection in which “the emotions will be deeper and the action more detailed,” as he advised Galatta Plus.
This chimes with a latest sample in Tamil cinema, in which movies really feel ‘over-written’ or rushed, as if they might not do with a minute extra on the run-time. The RJ Balaji-starrer Sorgavaasal involves thoughts: the crime thriller had immersive world-building and plenty of promising main characters, however the director appeared to wrestle to suit every part inside the stipulated runtime. There have been a number of narratives in latest years—akin to Viduthalai: Part 2, Kingston, and Retro—that make you marvel if a collection format would have been higher suited them. This feels very true whenever you take a look at a Black Warrant in Hindi, which is what Sorgavaasal might have been like. Or when a Mobland from the West reminds you of a latest beached whale that’s presumed to be the results of a five-hour movie being lower right into a 163-minute potboiler.
Pushkar agrees that sure movies, like Retro, could possibly be translated right into a collection. “Karthik understands the series medium well, and each chapter in Retro could be very well made into an episode because they are written with a structure. He also has these bookends for each chapter, and so I understand why he wishes to do it.”
Suriya in ‘Retro’
Interestingly, Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur movies had been launched as a mini-series on Netflix in the US and Canada; these areas are used to such experiments, like Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, which even Karthik had talked about to Netflix when he needed to launch his earlier movie, Jigarthanda Double X, as a collection. But there’s an instance of a movie being launched as a collection in India. Originally shot as a movie, it was re-edited as a collection, and each variations had been launched concurrently on a streaming platform.
The fascinating case of ‘Taish’
That title is Bejoy Nambiar’s Taish on ZEE5, an incredible case research to grasp Karthik’s try. Firstly, Taish occurred in the early days of the OTT increase, when movies might launch in theatres with out sealing a streaming deal. Bejoy didn’t should persuade streamers as a result of no streaming deal was struck when he tried this experiment. “That’s what freed us up. I was working as an independent producer, and we were looking to release this film theatrically. However, since the pandemic hit, we were trying to figure out an online sale for the film. During one of the trial shows of a preliminary cut of the film, a Netflix representative said if this would have worked better as a series.” The thought caught with Bejoy. “I bounced the idea with my editor, and we thought we could try and see if we could edit a series version. So we didn’t have anyone to impress or convince. It was an experiment that we were trying, and it kind of worked out.”
The filmmaker might then pitch the mission as each a movie and a show to ZEE5. “The COVID setback helped us look at the film from a different perspective and see what more we can do with it,” he says.
It’s notable that ZEE5 was open to Bejoy’s distinctive pitch; in spite of everything, this platform appears to be the sole exception in a market that seldom needs to experiment with kind. You could be shocked to know that the platform telecasts film variations of their fashionable reveals, like Ayali, on their tv channel. A filmmaker’s stubbornness to maintain his materials intact and ZEE5’s openness to have a look at a movie pitch as a collection acquired us Vilangu.
Promos for Bejoy Nambiar’s ‘Taish’, launched in 2020 as each a movie and a web collection on ZEE5
Raghavendra Hunsur, Chief Content Officer, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, states that the success of Vilangu has boosted their dedication in direction of long-form narratives in Tamil. “We’ve seen a growing interest among Tamil audiences in episodic storytelling, particularly when narratives carry cultural nuance and emotional depth. We also remain open to format innovation and experiments like Taish, where a narrative was presented both as a film and series, reflects our willingness to reimagine storytelling structures to best serve audience preferences,” says Raghavendra.
The long-form streaming house is in its infancy in southern India. Even if experiments seize headlines, actual change might emerge solely when writers see potential in the format. After all, experiments like Retro, a cloth appropriate for 2 contrasting codecs, are uncommon, and the economics of getting two variations of the identical product on the servers would possibly stop it from turning into a development. That mentioned, platforms have to be open to such distinctive pitches and make investments in regional storytelling.
“What’s needed here is a stronger commitment to regional cinema,” says Dhananjayan. “In Hindi, they release 12 originals a year. That’s one per month. If they have that kind of commitment in Tamil, things will move faster. Right now, there’s no such structured push. That’s what’s really missing.”
