Be it TVF Pitchers, Permanent Roommates, Aspirants, Kota Factory, Hostel Daze or our very beloved Panchayat across both its seasons, TVF (The Viral Fever) has been acing the game of entertainment. Interestingly some of its most popular series/shows including Permanent Roommates, Hostel Daze, and Panchayat's Season 3 are all slated for remakes in the South.
TVF is currently working on Tamil and Telugu remake of Panchayat, which will be its fourth remake after Permanent Roommates, Flames and Hostel Daze. This speaks volumes about the content house that has been churning out back-to-back popular series across platforms. One reason why it has been able to break boundaries with its all-age content is because of its universal appeal. By achieving this, they have raised the bar high for tapping into different markets and audiences with their original content.
As C.S.H.N. Murthy from the Institute of Media and Film Studies points out in his research paper titled, 'Film remakes as cross-cultural connections between North and South....,' Indian content creators in the north are now coming up with highly appealing original content that resonates with filmmakers in the south, even as the Hindi film industry runs high on remakes of movies from the South.
Remakes have been a phenomenon for many years in the global film industry. The Indian cinema industry, one of the world's largest industries, has been drawn towards remakes since the beginning of the talkie era (1931) for their ability to ensure profits and high grosses.
Moreover, remakes offer a great opportunity for directors and producers to produce a known film differently. Although attempts to classify remakes of traditional Hollywood films have been made by Druxman, Horton and McDougal, Forrest and Koos, Frow, Stern and Leitch, no attempts have been made to explain remakes in the Indian film industry, in which the cross-cultural influences on a pluralistic society such as India offer a fertile area of research to explore.
Murthy's study, which is heuristic and based on hermeneutics coupled with moving image analysis, is the first to attempt to build a theoretical construct at the intersection of cross-culturalism, industry, and intertextuality, and posits that a cinema industry with more cultural diversity has a greater probability of producing remakes for wider audiences.
TVF's success in coming up with original content that appeals to filmmakers from the Tamil, Telugu, and other film industries in the South speaks volumes and should also prod the Hindi film industry to emphasise original content and not simply rehashing originals, adapting and repackaging what has already worked. TVF's recent productions like Panchayat, which has found an audience across age, class, and culture divide, is a lesson that if Bollywood tries to learn, it'll make the film industry churn out more hits than duds.
