South side report card

Salman Khan's Kick has done big business but not all southern remakes in Bollywood have managed to hit the bullseye lately.

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South side report card
Kick

Salman Khan's new extravaganza Kick has done whopping Rs 206.9-crore business globally in five days. The film is a rehash of a Telugu hit of the same name and its success marks a fresh triumph for Bollywood's remake club, forever scampering for rights of Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam hits. Kick follows Akshay Kumar's blockbuster Holiday, remake of the Tamil biggie Thuppakki. However, not all recent southern remakes have ended up hits as these two.

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Earlier this year Salman's Jai Ho, spawned out of the Telugu hit Stalin, fared far below the recordbreaking show expected from the superstar. Akshay faced disaster last year trying to remake the Malayalam hit Pokkiri Raja as Boss. In fact, the only other southern remakes over the past year - Sanjay Dutt's Policegiri and Girish Taurani's launchpad Ramaiya Vastavaiya - have both been duds.

Kick
Kick has raked in over Rs 200 cr in a week

"A film won't work just because it remakes a hit. The audience seeks novel packaging and a high entertainment quotient, and a film should fulfil these criteria. Plus, target viewership counts. Jai Ho, for instance, failed because it was too sermonising. A Salman Khan film doesn't work without entertainment value," said trade analyst Komal Nahta.

Bollywood, according to Nahta, frequently turns southward for inspiration because southern filmmakers are constantly experimenting with the masala genre. "Most of the time, they try adding new ideas and angles to formula," he opined.

Actor-choreographer-filmmaker Prabhu Dheva, who has directed hit remakes such as Wanted and Rowdy Rathore, pointed at the big stars for the trend. "Southern remakes have become popular because big Bollywood heroes are doing these films," Prabhu said at a pre-launch event before his film Ramaiya Vastavaiya.

HOLIDAY
BUDGET Rs 40 crore
BOX-OFFICE Rs 112.65 crore
REMAKE OF the 2012 Tamil hit Thuppakki, starring Vijay & Kajal Aggarwal The film marked the return of Ghajini director AR Murugadoss in Bollywood. Murugadoss, who had also made Thuppakki, has made his mark by turning violence into quirky, mainstream entertainment. In Holiday, he put action superstar Akshay into such a package and it wholly worked with the masses.

KICK
BUDGET Rs 100 crore
BOX-OFFICE Rs 206.9 crore (one-week collection)
REMAKE OF the 2009 Telugu hit of the same name, starring Ravi Teja & Ileana D'Cruz. Sajid Nadiadwala's directorial debut has worked because it successfully packaged the action-comedy mix exactly as Salman Khan fans love it, drawing from an original script that was high on entertainment.

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BOSS
BUDGET Rs 72 crore
BOX-OFFICE Rs 54.15 crore
REMAKE OF the 2010 Malayalam hit Pokkiri Raja, starring Mammooty & Prithviraj. The film was an utter repeat of everything ever worked in Akshay Kumar's career. It tried creating a set-up that would let the superstar showcase his trademark action skills, slapstick and melodrama flair. However, Boss looked too similar to Khiladi 786, Akshay's last release before this one.


POLICEGIRI
BUDGET Rs 25 crore
BOX-OFFICE Rs 16.81 crore
REMAKE OF the 2003 Tamil hit Saamy, starring Vikram & Trisha. The whole idea of a badass cop ruthlessly taking on the local goons may have seemed fresh in 2003, when the Tamil flick Saamy was made, but it appeared cliched when Sanjay Dutt tried the trick a decade later. Worse, Dutt himself looked jaded and without his usual spunk

JAI HO
BUDGET Rs 65 crore
BOX-OFFICE Rs 117 crore
REMAKE OF the 2006 Telugu hit Stalin, starring Chiranjeevi. On paper, Jai Ho is a hit because it made profits for its producer, Salman's brother Sohail Khan. For Salman fans, it was a letdown because its sermonising tone killed the fun factor one expects from the actor's films. The film was expected to bust the record of Dhoom 3 but it failed.

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RAMAIYA VASTAVAIYA
BUDGET Rs 35 crore
BOX-OFFICE Rs 30 crore
REMAKE OF the 2005 Telugu film Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana, starring Siddharth & Trisha. The Telugu film that inspired Girish Taurani's launchpad was itself based on Sooraj Barjatya's 1989 blockbuster, Maine Pyar Kiya. The Rajshri notion of innocent love seemed too gullible in 2013. Plus, neither Girish nor Shruti Haasan had enough star power.

(all figures according to industry estimates)

REVERSE TREND

The South, too, is waking up to the idea of remaking Hindi hits now.

Singham Returns
Singham Returns is the latest Bollywood film that has reportedly been tapped by southern filmmakers for remake rights.

Ajay Devgn is back with Singham Returns on Independence Day, but the film as a saleable package has already impressed producers down South. Reports suggest certain southern producers have shown interest in remaking the film in Tamil and Telugu.

Interesting, since the first Singham was a remake of Suriya's Tamil superhit Singam. Queen and Aashiqui 2 have been other recent Bollywood hits that will see southern remakes. And when Yash Raj Films decided to remake their Hindi superhit Band Baaja Baaraat in Tamil as Aaha Kalyanam, it proved even Bollywood's most powerful production house now finds the idea lucrative. Aaha Kalyanam starring YRF find Vaani Kapoor did good business, as did Nanban, the Tamil remake of 3 Idiots, and Kamal Haasan's Vasool Raja MBBS, inspired by Munna Bhai MBBS.

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A slew of other recent remakes including Anamika (remake of Kahaani), Gabbar Singh (Dabangg), Settai (Delhi Belly) and Unnaipol Oruvan (A Wednesday!) proved entertainment in cinema knows no language barrier. "There is an exchange of ideas happening between the Hindi and the southern industries now, which works for Indian commercial cinema overall. That fact that the southern industry is taking note of Hindi scripts is a shot in the arm for writers here," said trade analyst Komal Nahta.

FLASHBACK
WHILE much hype is created over how southern remakes score at the Bollywood box-office lately, the idea is actually not new. Not many know Dilip Kumar's 1967 superhit Ram Aur Shyam, which spawned a slew of copies, was actually inspired by the 1964 Telugu hit Ramudu Bheemudu starring T. Rama Rao.

Sridevi in the 1983 superhit Himmatwala, remake of the Telugu film Ooriki Monagadu.

The seventies and eighties was when southern remakes really took off, with Jeetendra striking gold with consecutive releases. By the eighties, the actor was not only scoring box-office hits with remake superhits such as Himmatwala, Tohfa, Mawaali and Maqsad, he also successfully paired with southern heroines such as Sridevi, Jaya Pradha and Bhanupriya.

Amitabh Bachchan and Mithun Chakraborty were among top stars of that era who adopted Jeetendra's gameplan of southern remakes. "Southern remakes were always in vogue since that industry - combining primarily Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam films -makes for a huge base of ready material," said trade analyst Komal Nahta. A steady flow of films rehashed from Tamil and Telugu hits that continued through the nineties included hits such as Judwaa, Biwi No. 1 and Virasat.

Ghajini in 2008 restarted the trend in the noughties by rehashing a Tamil hit of the same name. Wanted, Ready, Bodyguard, Singham, Son Of Sardaar, Rowdy Rathore and Force followed. The advent of big directors such as Mani Ratnam, Priyadarshan, K. Balachander, K. Bappaiah, T. Rama Rao and K. Murali Mohan Rao among others since the seventies is a reason why southern scripts have forayed Bollywood.