Winning the box-office race with 'love'

Unrequited love affairs are common place in modern lives, where one finds many harbouring tender feelings for one-time classmates and colleagues throughout their growing-up years. Movies made on these themes have also naturally enjoyed great success if the story is narrated with the right mix of delicate emotions and heartaches. In fact, the presence of social media nowadays has often lent a high level of expectations to such ventures, which are usually helmed by young favourites of the audience, both male and female.

Alphonse Puthren, it is reported, wanted to make a film in Hindi with Anil Kapoor soon after the success of his film 'Neram' in 2014. Instead, he went on to make 'Premam', a coming of age romantic entertainer, released in 2015, which bestowed a lot of passionate feelings in all its characters. Set over a 15-year timeframe which generously allowed the director to etch his frames lovingly, it showed an identifiable set of faces, most of them famous names in southern cinema today – Nivin Pauly, Anupama Parameswaran, Sai Pallavi and Madonna Sebastian - who are all involved with each other and how each finds his/her own path as the journey of life unfolds for each one of them.

None expected that this film would become such a rage, such a 'must-watch' for young lovers round the world wherever they are. Shot with a modest budget of under Rs 5 crore, given the relative limited market potential of Malayalam films, it went on to amass Rs 60 crore, a mammoth success by any standards. In the neighbouring film territories of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka also, it was eagerly lapped up and obviously, a rage among the teenyboppers and young lovers.

Chandoo Mondeti, who had done two films with Nikhil Siddhartha by then (his debut film ' Karthikeya' which hit the theatres in 2014 has gone on to be a major hit when it saw a sequel this year) was handled the task of remaking the megahit into Telugu, which also managed to be one of the top box-office grossers of 2016, though it was made at a higher budget of Rs 20 crore, earning for its production house the double of investment made – Rs 40+ crore. Quite notably, the hero, the Akkineni scion, Naga Chaitanya managed to shake off an indifferent run of a dozen-odd films with which his status at the BO was still unsteady. Surprisingly, Sai Pallavi, whose infectious and energetic dance moves and comely presence was a major appeal was replaced by Shruti Haasan, a not-very-impressive change of role. As far as the other two heroines who were repeated in Telugu, Anupama Parameswaran has a market even today with the younger lot of heroes while Madonna is more seen in Tamil films.