With these weapons in his armoury, Venkat Prabhu keeps churning engaging films one after the other. He has thus gone on to become a self-assured director and any film producer’s dream signing!
There is a marketing term ‘Disruptive Innovation’ which is attributed to products that are so innovative and receptive that they create for themselves, a market on their own, eroding and eating up on the market for the alternate that was available so far. Think no further than digicams for an example.
When we attempt to extend that term to Tamil cinema to see if anyone has created a genre on their own thereby creating a market for themselves, we get reminded of Venkat Prabhu.
In this article, we take a look at the various disruptive ideas he has brought to the table, how successful they have been in creating a market for themselves and how they have attributed to VP’s success in Tamil cinema.
Chennai 600028
Reception: We later had a spurt in the number of multi-starrers with small heroes (some of them involving heroes straight out of the Chennai 28’s A-team too!)
Sa Ro Ja
Goa
Reception: Not all disruptive stuff work and Goa became a victim of this axiom. Nothing took off from the disruptive ideas attempted in Goa except, maybe, for the casting of foreign national women in films. There were a few cases of that happening post Goa.
Mankatha
- Had negative and only negative shades for him;
- Had a good amount of screen space for multiple other actors;
- Had no love/sentiment/message/justifying flashback quotient attached to its character
This is as disruptive an innovation as we have seen in Tamil cinema. This was a tight-rope walk which Venkat Prabhu pulled off with aplomb. We have to credit him for having sealed the deal.
Reception: The film clicked big time and like the director himself had mentioned in an Awards function – Mankatha has pioneered image independent multi-starrers involving big stars. We are already seeing a flurry of multi-starrers which have either released or are in the pipeline.
Biriyani
Reception: The film has had highly positive reviews, but the climax twist hasn’t had as much impact as the ones in Mankatha or Saroja but it emphasises the fact that no scene in Venkat Prabhu’s films will come and go unnecessarily. The audience will have to be on high alert to guess ahead of the twist(s) in his next film with Suriya!
Talking of Venkat Prabhu and disruptive ideas, let us not forget one-liners! EKSI is now a widely popular acronym! The end credits ‘Bloopers’ in his films are the next. The one involving Vaibhav, Mandy and Venkat in Biriyani was a screamer!!
Keep being disruptively receptive VP; don’t trap yourself in the genre that you have created in the process. Good luck for your next! A Venkat Prabhu _______? We are waiting!
The article has captured the intricacies and the economics involved in the ideas of Venkat Prabhu and his movie making skills very well.