This Article First Appeared In Indian Express On Jan 02, 2023
One of the most remarkable developments in cinema in 2022 was how many people crowded to cinema halls across the country to watch films made in south India. The pan-Indian success of films like RRR, Kantara and KGF:2 reflected a country that was waking up to a kind of cinema that had been beyond its imagination and reach so far. And it wasn’t just the big “blockbusters” — smaller films, such as those made in Malayalam, also received a lot of audience attention.
Does this mean that Hindi cinema has, as lamented by many, lost its charm? Will the success of south Indian cinema keep getting bigger and bigger? This is hard to say definitively because audience tastes are not easy to gauge. However, there are certain factors which shed light on why movies made in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada have managed to go beyond their traditional audiences and capture the imagination of the nation in a way that Hindi films have not been able to recently.