Single screen theatres are banking on re-releases. The re-release of Puneeth Rajkumar’s ‘Appu’ in 2025 and ‘Jackie’ in 2024 witnessed houseful shows and contributed significantly to the revenue. Credit: DH file photo

Bengaluru: Kannada cinema, with a history of 92 years, is grappling with a new dilemma — should it cater to the pan-India expectations generated by blockbuster hits such as KGF and Kantara, or make less expensive cinema with better box office prospects in Karnataka?

In the six years since the gangster drama KGF hit the screens, many filmmakers in Karnataka have attempted richly mounted, big canvas productions, with national and international audiences in mind. Not many have succeeded, and the focus on scale has created a void in an industry otherwise conservative in its spending.

The industry is paying a hidden price for its obsession with pan-Indian cinema, many insiders told DH.

The sequels to KGF and Kantara (in the latter case, the story goes back in time from where the first film began) have continued their winning streak at the box office, but most other ambitious ventures have tanked.

Kabzaa (2023), starring Shivarajkumar, Upendra and Sudeep, and 45 (2025), starring Shivarajkumar, Upendra and Raj B Shetty, are just two of the many films that came in the wake of the big hits and lost their way. Some films have fared so poorly that their producers have sworn off films for life.

Of the 253 Kannada films produced in 2025, only a handful have recovered their investments. The numbers were equally discouraging in 2024, with just 10-12 moderate grossers and almost no big hits. Film production is always a gamble, but when the odds are so bleak, the enthusiasm for creative risks takes a hit.

Ravichandra A J, producer of the sleeper hit Blink (2024), believes production houses with deep pockets — for example, Hombale Films, which made KGF Chapter 1 and 2 — should not remain wedded to lavish spectacles. “They should back young filmmakers,” says Ravichandra, who has distributed Shakhahari and Second Case of Seetharam, films with tight budgets.

The theatrical success of Blink, a sci-fi shot with theatre actors on a shoestring budget, brought hope. While most films pitched to pan-Indian audiences failed, Blink went from being hyper-local to becoming pan-Indian, finding love on OTT. It was dubbed into six Indian languages and released on Amazon Prime.

A producer who requests anonymity believes the gloom can be dispelled by enlightened project choices. “When an industry is in distress, production houses must make films with reasonable budgets, say with Rs 50 lakh to Rs 100 crore. An industry needs films made at different budget points. In Telugu, six or seven production houses are actively making all kinds of films. Mythri Movie Makers, for example, makes a Rs 500 crore film and follows it up with a Rs 5 crore film.”

The production numbers are high mainly because of Karnataka’s subsidy policy. More than 200 films are made every year, many with an eye on the subsidy rather than the box office. The government gives subsidies to 100-125 films a year, with each film getting Rs 10 lakh. Subsidies have hit a road block though. Citing a financial crunch, the government hasn’t given subsidies from 2018-19. Just last week, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah promised to clear the dues, and the talk is that, going forward, subsidies will be discontinued.

Amid the despondency, cinema from the Karnataka coast has driven home many telling points. Su From So (2025), scripted and directed by J P Thuminad, did not bank on big promotions; instead, it went entirely by word of mouth. The comedy, produced by Raj B Shetty’s Lighter Buddha Films, drove home an anti-superstition message, and became the second-highest grosser of the year. Rare hits of the past couple of years, such as Su From So, owe their success to their writing, and not so much to stars or big banners.

Actor-producer Dhananjaya K A believes actors and producers who have reaped the fruits of blockbuster hits should encourage younger filmmakers from diverse backgrounds, and that is the way to keep the industry ticking.

He tasted success as an actor with Tagaru (2018) and the Telugu hit Pushpa: The Rise (2021), and set up Daali Pictures in 2021 with the objective of promoting fresh talent. His productions Badava Rascal (2021) and Tagaru Palya (2023) impressed audiences with their storytelling strength and production compactness.

Some filmmakers such as Rishab Shetty assert, and rightly so, that truly local stories can have universal appeal, but the lens is blurred when an entire industry begins to chase pan-India dreams. As film critic Swaroop Kodur says, stories are no longer rooted when an industry is obsessed with catering to huge, imaginary audiences.

A consequence is that films blindly follow other films, with no attention being paid to original writing. When a film is structured exactly like last year’s hit, it is more redundancy than inspiration. Kabzaa came out of KGF, and so many 'Kantaras' are still in the making. 

Formulaic films have existed since the beginning of cinema, and certain tropes are indispensable in storytelling, but for a film to be fresh, filmmakers trying to break the mould say, it must draw from contemporary realities. “Big films have always captured our imagination, but we are at a point when we are exhausted by the hype. There is so much to deal with in real life, and then we have a visual overload because of social media, and so increasingly, cinema is taking a backseat,” Kodur says.

In Karnataka, unlike in neighbouring Kerala, the literary community has remained distant from the film industry. Some Kannada directors, such as Puttanna Kanagal, were aware of literary works, and often based their films on novels and their songs on the poetry of the greats, but that was another era. With some exceptions, most filmmakers in current Kannada cinema are oblivious to the wealth of possibilities in contemporary literary writing.

Aravind Kaushik, director of offbeat films Nam Areal Ond Dina (2010) and Tughlaq (2012), says the industry lacks filmmakers who see their art as a medium to express their unique perspectives. “Instead, the focus has shifted towards market-driven content, prioritizing entertainment and box office success over meaningful storytelling. This disconnect leads to inflated budgets and a loss of connection between the film and its audience,” he says.

Multiplex culture, with its premium ticket pricing, is designed for big-budget films, and so it is detrimental to smaller, independent cinema, he says, advocating a curated distribution system that works on the lines of film festivals and cinema clubs. A ticket should ideally be priced below Rs 200, and that would make cinema more accessible and democratic, Kaushik says.

Producers are flooded with pitches, and they see a pattern. “Every director wants to make a pan-India film. Out here, Kannada audiences have lost trust in the industry. We have to first gain their trust back. We have to understand the market here and the focus should be on the market here. Instead, everyone is after the ‘pan-India’ market,” says a producer. Talking about the Arjun Janya directorial 45, a multi-starrer produced by Ramesh Reddy that fizzled out at the box office, he says, “Good producers sadly are falling into the wrong hands.”

Ravichandra believes that nothing may come out of the Rs 200 ceiling on tickets in the short term. As a marketing strategy, Second Case Of Seetharam, a slick police procedural starring Vijay Raghavendra, opened preview shows for Re 1. And yet the halls remained empty, he says. Subsequent reports said the film had picked up and was doing well in Tamil Nadu. Ravichandra argues that the ceiling on ticket rates, if implemented, will create a more democratic cinema viewing culture in the future. A production house in Bengaluru is contesting in court the Siddaramaiah government’s decision to cap ticket rates at Rs 200.

Where writing is concerned, Kaushik underlines the importance of the individual voice: “Any form of art including cinema becomes a product later. It is primarily an expression of who the artist is.” The market for mass-produced ‘content’ reaches a point of saturation, and that is where the Kannada film industry is at today, he says.

“We have to up our game as far as storytelling is concerned. Filmmaking in itself is not very difficult today. So the primary question we have to ask ourselves is why we are making a film. Everyone is running behind big budgets, where every actor aims to become a star and every movie aims to become a pan-Indian movie,” he says.

Insiders agree the industry is facing numerous challenges — the inability to invest in writing, the refusal to accept failure, and a focus on short-term gain rather than long-term consistency.

A new problem is the paranoia that has gripped filmmakers when their productions are panned by critics. Many production houses orchestrate a positive reception for their films by paying TV and social media channels for promotions. The first three days after a release are crucial for a film’s success, and many producers set aside money to create a buzz. Sometimes, they end up blaming independent critics for the failure of their films.

A season of misselling may have created a crisis of credibility for Kannada films when it comes to OTT. “They treat calls from Kannada productions like credit card spam calls,” a filmmaker says. When hyped films, sold to OTT in 2023 at fantastic rates, fared miserably at the theatres, the OTT bosses became wary. 

Amazon Prime Video now follows a pay per view model for Kannada films — Rs 4 per hour of viewing. If a viewer watches a full film, the producer gets Rs 10. Netflix buys outright streaming rights for Telugu and Hindi films, and JioHotstar is picking up films in Tamil, Telugu Malayalam and Hindi. Zee buys both streaming and satellite rights of films that have performed well in theatres.

The argument that Kannada cinema has a limited market is often countered by hits that defy the odds, and film buffs recall fondly how, when Rajkumar, Vishnuvardhan, Ananth Nag, Shankar Nag, Srinath and Ambarish were delivering commercial hits, a cinema inspired by literature emerged parallelly. The industry is at such a crossroads all over again.