Speaking at FICCI FRAMES two days before Drishyam: The Conclusion hits theatres, the actor argued Hindi cinema has to please a far wider, more divided crowd than regional films do.
Ajay Devgn picked an odd venue to vent about his own industry, but a film festival stage works fine when you've got a release two days away. Speaking at FICCI FRAMES on its second day, Devgn said Hindi cinema has a problem nobody talks about enough: it doesn't know who it's making films for.
"I'm not taking away credit from any other cinema. It is difficult to make films everywhere whether it is international or traditional cinema. But, personally, I feel that making a Hindi film is most difficult because you do not know who your target audience is," he said.
His argument, in short: regional cinema has it easier because the audience is defined by geography. A Punjabi film knows its Punjab. A Tamil or Telugu film knows its state. Hindi cinema has to travel across states, languages and income brackets, and somewhere in that stretch the audience stops agreeing on anything.
"When you make a Punjabi film, Tamil or Telugu film, you know your audience as it is for a certain region. But for a Hindi film to get numbers, things are not the same, as every 80 to 90 km the language and thought process change," Devgn said. "Like, there is mass and class audience, so either one section of the audience likes it or the other doesn't." He added that even international cinema has a clearer sense of who it's speaking to, which leaves Hindi filmmakers with the hardest brief of all: appeal to everybody.
The timing isn't accidental. Devgn returns as Vijay Salgaonkar in Drishyam: The Conclusion on October 2, the third film in a franchise that's made real money twice over by sticking close to its Malayalam source. This one doesn't. Writer-director Abhishek Pathak has said he wanted to break from the Mohanlal originals the moment Drishyam 2 wrapped, calling a straight remake a shortcut that "takes away from your craft." The new film is his own story, not a translation of one.
That's a bet in itself. Audiences who've watched Vijay Salgaonkar outsmart the system twice, in two different scripts drawn from the same Malayalam blueprint, now get a version with no safety net of a proven original underneath it. Devgn's comments at FICCI FRAMES read almost like he's bracing the industry, and maybe himself, for the fact that pleasing a Hindi-speaking audience spread across a continent was never going to be simple, franchise or not.
The returning cast is sizeable. Tabu, Shriya Saran, Rajat Kapoor, Ishita Dutta, Mrunal Jadhav and Kamlesh Sawant are all back, with Jaideep Ahlawat, Prakash Raj and Saurabh Shukla joining in new roles. Whether that ensemble, and an original script, can hold together the mass-and-class split Devgn described gets tested at the box office starting Friday.
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