For decades, Indian cinema has had a rape script with three roles. A lecherous villain, a woman violated, and a hero who arrived just in time to avenge her. That template is cracking with a new crop of films and shows where the perpetrator grows up listening to poetry about women’s empowerment, speaks English, and belongs to your family.

‘Chiraiya’, a new web series that has ruffled feathers in India’s ever-growing manosphere, puts a face to that. In a reputed joint family in Lucknow, a sari-clad Kamlesh — the elder bahu — asks a question that old cinema never had to answer. “As women, we’ve been taught to never cross the rekha like Sita, and we’d be safe. But what if we aren’t safe inside the rekha itself?”

Her question follows an event that rarely makes it to popular culture: her sister-in-law being subjected to marital rape, an act not yet criminalized in India.

The show’s afterlife online has seen one of the rape scenes turned into a meme in incel circles online, where it is used to argue that ‘modern women’ are okay with increasing their ‘body count’ before marriage but quick to label sex within marriage as rape.

Beyond these rage-bait debates, however, the show is emblematic of how a string of recent shows and films are tackling rape, moving beyond helpless victims, macho male saviours, and neat definitions of justice. They are taking on ‘hushed’ issues like marital rape, and also examining systemic failures, legal hurdles, and the everyday-ness of perpetrators — a far cry from voyeuristic tropes, torn blouses, and villains laughing as women beg ‘bhagwan ke liye mujhe chod do’.

‘Chiraiya’ director Shashant Shah says moving beyond villains was a “conscientious” decision, as is placing the story of rape in a liberal, middle-class family. Arun, who commits marital rape on multiple occasions, is shown as an English-speaking younger son of a progressive father, who writes evocative poetry about women’s empowerment — but fails to stand up for his bahu.

“We wanted to show education has nothing to do with how women are getting treated, and it’s not something that happens in lower-strata societies,” he adds.

Assamese short film ‘Xoudaamini’ takes a similar approach. It begins where most films tend to end — with an intercaste couple eloping and marrying. But instead of a happy ending, the marriage unravels when the husband, in a drunken state, forces himself on his wife.

Priyanka Sohoria, the film’s director, says the story was born out of personal experiences of women in her family. In ‘Xoudaamini’, the woman leaves home after the incident, along with her son.

“After watching it, many women reached out to me and said they had gone through something similar, but couldn’t leave,” Sohoria adds. “That’s why such stories are important — to show other possibilities.” Released on YouTube for free, the short film has amassed nearly three lakh views.

The National Award-winning Malayalam film ‘Aattam’, too, avoids depicting the act itself, and instead focuses on what follows within a ‘liberal’ theatre group. The accused, a colleague, is defended by peers, while the survivor faces questions in a space she once considered safe.

This move away from stereotyped villains towards familiar, everyday perpetrators has implications beyond cinema, says Nikunj Kulshreshtha, assistant professor at Jindal Global Law School.

In a study of 4,485 Hindi films between 1980 and 2022, he analyzed markers commonly associated with rape victims, such as whether the victim was educated, her relation with the perpetrator, whether she struggled physically, and her dressing.

“I found that these films were not only pushing the image of an ideal rape victim, but also the ideal offender,” says Nikunj, pointing to the long-standing depiction of rapists as visibly deviant men with criminal pasts or addictions.

“Such depictions impact how the judiciary views offenders, and often damage the credibility of victim narratives, as a lot of people have difficulties in believing that a boy from a good family could be a potential sexual offender,” he adds.

Along with the changing depiction of victims, the hero too is being reimagined. In older films such as ‘Shahenshah’, ‘Damini’, and ‘Insaf Ka Tarazu’, rape often functioned as a plot device to trigger a male protagonist-led revenge arc. While such narratives persist in some recent blockbusters like ‘Dhurandhar 2’ and ‘Maharaja’, a growing number of filmmakers are moving away from it.

In Anubhav Sinha’s ‘Assi’, a courtroom drama centred around a gang rape where Taapsee Pannu plays a fierce lawyer, there are no dramatic victory speeches or cathartic endings. Instead, there’s a call for reflection, with the movie title alluding to the NCRB data of over 80 rapes happening every day in the country.

“I was not interested in creating a hero, or making this incident the podium the hero stands on. I also didn’t want to blame a single perpetrator, or even the police or the judiciary in isolation,” Sinha says. “Maybe the onus rests on us. There’s a lot left to be desired in the way we raise our boys. On the other hand, from a young age, we ask girls to keep quiet and ignore small acts of harassment.”

‘Chiraiya’ too resists a cliched saviour saga to focus on imperfect allies and female solidarity. At its centre is Kamlesh, who initially struggles to recognise marital rape but gradually educates herself and stands by her sister-in-law, acknowledging that women often pass on and perpetuate patriarchal norms, too.

“I wanted to focus on this aspect of sisterhood because even today, a lot of women feel that they don’t have anybody to go to when something like this happens to them,” Shah says.

More recent narratives are also widening the lens. Oscar-nominated crime drama ‘Santosh’ examines caste bias and corruption in the investigation of a Dalit woman’s rape and murder, while the sequel to the successful ‘Dhurandhar’ briefly touches on sexual violence against men — as a way of exerting masculinity and power — often ignored in mainstream depictions.

“It’s more about looking inward. I’m fighting with my own misogyny every day,” says Sinha, recalling how he grew up in a household where he would get his plate of food before his sister.

Unlearning such “small” acts, he argues, is crucial in battling ‘rape culture’. “We have to understand that it’s not a group of men gleefully fantasizing about rape. It’s the normalization of sexual objectification. Rape is probably the by-product of that…both on and off the screen.”

“It’s taken me over nine years, a large chunk of my life and a lot of blood, sweat, toil and tears to make Agra,” filmmaker Kanu Behl shares over a phone call, “I couldn’t have let this go.” Agra, which won Best Indie Film at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne and premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight to critical acclaim, is a psychological drama, exploring sexuality and loneliness. Earlier this week, after being given severely limited screenings for his film—only 70 screens across the country—the filmmaker took to social media to call out the “long-standing systemic pattern affecting all independent films in India”: the denial of theatrical access.

His post immediately found support within the community, with 46 filmmakers, including Chaitanya Tamhane, Payal Kapadia, Shaunak Sen, Vasan Bala, co-signing a statement demanding fair access for independent films.

“The group is expanding as we speak,” Behl told Mirror, “We are now in the process of forming a body that will come together to talk about our collective rights.”

Directors Alankrita Shrivastava and Arati Kadav, co-signees to the statement, say their solidarity stems from having experienced similar helplessness. Shrivastava remembers the difficulty she faced in getting a theatrical release for her film Turning 30 (2011), a romantic comedy, starring Gul Panag, revolving around an ad executive who gets dumped and has her ideas stolen before her 30th birthday.

“We got screens in certain places where the film honestly did not have any resonance, whereas we needed more screens in places where the film was doing well,” she says.

For Kadav, who found OTT fame with Mrs (2023) — a remake of the Malayalam film, The Great Indian Kitchen — bootstrapping her career had been the norm for the longest time. Her sci-fi fantasy film Cargo (2019), starring Vikrant Massey and Shweta Tripathi, set aboard a spaceship where souls of the deceased arrive before they are prepared for reincarnation, went to over 25 festivals, including the Miami International Science Fiction Film Festival (MiSciFi).

“Though it was lapped up by everyone outside India, I struggled with distribution for about one-and-a-half years. I had put in a lot of money into this project, and felt quite dejected,” she says.

While the film didn’t get a theatrical release — Kadav says she understands “theatrical reservations for some festival films”, though the need of the hour is to find “incentives for them”—it was eventually picked up by Netflix where it had a decent five-year run. Having the backing of an industry powerhouse like Anurag Kashyap, who was among Cargo’s many co-producers helped. “I got lucky,” Kadav admits.

The fight at the ground level for independent films is getting harder with each passing year, says Kimaya Hemdev, director and head of acquisition at Star Entertainment Pvt Ltd. “Companies that were once only theatre owners have now also become distributors. So, you’re competing with a distributor who also has the bargaining power of a theatre,” she explains.

When producers, distributors and exhibitors are the same people, it creates a monopoly—one where, she says, “there’s a clear preference for the films they distribute, especially studio movies.”

Quality time slots and cinemas are carved out for the big studio films, which are also exonerated from paying a Virtual Print Fee —a charge producers pay to exhibitors to help cover the costs of converting to digital cinema projectors — which Hemdev says is anywhere between Rs 25,000-Rs 50,000 per screen, per show, and can be prohibitive for independent filmmakers. If a film had to run for a week with a single show daily, it would translate to Rs 3.5 lakh approx.

The long-held argument that there’s no audience for independent films, Behl says, is “fallacious”. “On Tuesday night, when I finally got a show [for Agra] at PVR Citi Mall in Andheri, there were 119 people who came to watch it,” he says.

According to Shrivastava, what’s happening right now is neither fair to independent films, nor the audience. “If the audience can’t access these films, how will they ever get a taste of another kind of cinema?”

Vishek Chauhan, CEO of Rupbani Cinemas, Purnia, Bihar, says that ultimately, “the programming power lies only with the audience.” He stresses that no exhibitor in their right mind would deliberately refuse a good film that promises viewership, because theatres operate as businesses and decisions depend on demand and viability. He finds it unfair to pin the blame solely on exhibitors.

Theatrical success, he says, is no longer the only metric of a film’s performance. The majority of the viewers consume films at home on OTT or television, with theatre earnings form only “12–20 per cent of a film’s overall pie.” Therefore, he says, forcing exhibitors to run films with low turnout “jeopardizes other films that could do better.”

Down South, in the Malayalam film industry, filmmakers working with novel scripts have tried to negotiate the system to reach the right kind of viewers. A case in point is the 2023 National Award-winning drama Aattam, written and directed by Anand Ekarshi, which turns the spotlight on a theatre group whose sole actress faces sexual assault by one of the men. According to him, “shooting and making the film is actually the easiest part; releasing the film is the toughest.”

As an early business strategy, Ekarshi raised funds to make a 10-minute pilot of his film to show producers. “The idea was to give them a glimpse of the script, understand the characters, and see what the actors could pull off.” Joy Movie Productions came on board soon after. Aattam, despite its experimental nature, turned into commercial project. It was made on a shoestring budget of Rs 3 crore, of which Rs 80 lakh was dedicated solely to marketing—the movie enjoyed a successful theatrical run and bagged a prime OTT release.

Meanwhile, the theatre run of Prasanth Vijay’s Ithiri Neram, a romantic drama starring Zarin Shihab and Roshan Mathew, earlier this month in Kerala has been hard-won. Vijay has made two critically acclaimed films before, Athisayangalude Venal and Daayam, funded by a school friend and his wife respectively, which didn’t make it to theatres. He tried to cut the risks with Ithiri Neram by getting a producer — Jomon Jacob of Mankind Cinemas and four others — who shared his sensibility. “Even after the film was made, it took a while to find the right distributor,” he says.

“But I waited, because I wanted the film to reach the last mile, even if it were fewer theatres.” The goal was also to be able to get a good OTT platform for wider reach. The film opened in 60 theatres in the first week of November and continues to reach newer audiences.

The fact that the Kerala state government has taken up initiatives to support the arts, has also come to the aid of filmmakers. Debutante filmmaker Sivaranjini J won a Rs 1.5 crore woman’s empowerment programme grant for her film, Victoria in 2022 — there is no such equivalent grant in Maharashtra for women. The production was taken care of by the Kerala State Film Development Corporation and the movie, when it releases next week, will be shown across eight government-run theatres in major cities. A government grant comes with its own set of challenges with filmmakers having to deal with red-tapeism and mounds of paperwork. “But it gives you a good start,” she admits.

Meenakshi Shedde, Senior Programming Advisor-South Asia at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin Film Festival for 27 years, says that in contrast with Bollywood, Kerala has a very strong grassroots film movement.

“Even the rice farmers know their cinema, and that’s unthinkable in most parts of the country,” she says, adding “that the International Film Festival of Kerala and film societies have played a huge role in shaping their taste”.

Internationally, independent American production house A24 has been backing indie and artistically driven films in its attempt to push high-quality cinema. Closer home, Manish Mundra, filmmaker and founder-producer, Drishyam Films has emerged as an unlikely champion of independent films — Masaan (2015) and Newton (2017) are part of the success story.

“For things to change, everyone must play a part. Producers and distributors cannot do it alone. Audiences need to show up for these films, and the government needs to recognize that cinema is a cultural resource. We need more single screens, art-house theatres and community spaces across the country, and not just urban and expensive multiplexes focused on mainstream releases,” Mundra says.

Shedde believes that independent filmmakers should also tap into movements taking place within cities like Mumbai, that provide platforms to showcase good, quality cinema. “Film Heritage Foundation and VHS [Versova Homage Screenings], for instance, regularly screen indie productions and also get audiences for these screenings.” She stresses the need for filmmakers to think more about “how to help create an audience for their films as well.

Karan Talwar, filmmaker and co-founder of Harkat Studios, has for the last decade been building an alternative community-driven space for independent and experimental films. “Harkat now screens nine to 10 films a month under our independent calendar, with guest curators and rotating themes,” he says. They operate on a 50-50 box-office sharing model, to help filmmakers earn revenue.

“We are seeing a massive uptick of people who want to come in for these screenings,” he says, adding. He believes that the one way to fight this system is to make new inroads and find new friends.

Every one loves Malayalam cinema. Just ask them. Critics gush. Film festivals swoon. North Indian cinephiles drop references to Aattam and Manjummel Boys at dinner parties to establish their impeccable taste. But in the immortal words of Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money!” If love paid bills, Malayalam producers wouldn’t be threatening a complete industry shutdown from June 1.

It’s a curious paradox: 2024 was a banner year for Malayalam cinema when the survival drama Manjummel Boys, with a Rs 20 crore budget and gross earnings of Rs 240+ crore, became the highest grossing Malayalam film ever, while Gen-Z romance Premalu, with a Rs 3 crore budget and Rs 136 crore in revenue, emerged as possibly India’s most profitable film of the year. There are plenty of others that left a lasting imprint on the cultural landscape.

Aavesham, an action film starring Fahadh Faasil, became a phenomenon, dominating social media with viral reels and memes. Aattam, a movie that deals with sexual harassment and brought to life by a cast of nine actors from theatre, clinched the National Award for Best Feature Film as Malayalam cinema swept eight awards at the 70th National Film Awards. The critic’s darling of Indian cinema was finally getting its due.

Meanwhile, in Kerala, producers stared at their balance sheets with such desperation that you would think they were mentally cataloguing their organs by market value.

The brutal economics of filmmaking has always involved risk—most businesses understand that failure is more common than success. But in Malayalam cinema, we are witnessing a particularly perverse form of capitalism: actors pocket 60% of production budgets and walk away unscathed when films tank, only to demand higher fees for their next project, according to G Suresh Kumar, vice-president of the Kerala Film Producers Association (KFPA). The producer alone bears the crushing weight of failure, he says.

Industry insiders point to the case of the Tovino Thomas-starrer Identity —produced at Rs 30 crore, it collected a mere Rs 6 crore in January, approximately equal to the actor’s paycheck. While Thomas reportedly offered another date to help the producer recoup losses, the fundamental question remains: if actors inflated their rates during the OTT boom, shouldn’t they settle for less money, now that the bubble has burst?

The cautionary tales are piling up faster than unpaid invoices. Take Sureshanteyum Sumalathayudeyum Hrudayahariyaya Pranayakadha, starring newcomer Rajesh Madhavan. It began with a budget of Rs 4 crore but ballooned to Rs 20 crore— a 500% increase, equivalent to the cost of a typical Mammootty film —with allegedly no cost-control efforts from director Ratheesh Balakrishnan, according to co-producer Ajith Thalappilly.

Thalappilly says he had to sell his Mercedes-Benz and teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, saved only by a last-minute intervention from a distributor. The director still collected his hefty paycheck, speculated to be Rs 1 crore, and demanded 30% profits from a film that spectacularly flopped, according to an industry insider who requested anonymity.

This isn’t the industry’s first financial crisis. Malayalam cinema has weathered storms before, but the scale has changed dramatically. Where losses once registered in lakhs of rupees, they now balloon into double-digit crores, creating recovery periods measured in decades rather than years.

What makes today’s predicament particularly treacherous is the aftermath of a false prosperity. The Covid-era OTT windfall had created a dangerous illusion. Streaming platforms were snapping up every Malayalam film, regardless of quality, paying premium prices that inflated everyone’s expectations. Actors doubled their fees overnight. Directors expanded budgets. Producers borrowed heavily, convinced that streaming rights would cover their investments.

Then reality hit with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. OTT platforms “recalibrated” their approach, realizing that Malayalam cinema’s audience reach didn’t justify their splurge, says an industry insider requesting anonymity. The new playbook: wait to see which films succeed in theatres, then cherry-pick the winners. For most producers, this means no OTT deal at all.

“Actors were thinking, if Allu Arjun can rake in Rs 400 crore, why can’t we manage Rs 1.5 crore? But when the bubble burst, they were not reducing their fee,” says the person quoted above.

Even the lucky few who secure streaming contracts face brutal negotiations, delays designed to pressure desperate producers into accepting lower fees, and payment schedules stretched over months. By the time the money arrives, interest on production loans would have already eaten away any potential profit.

Most Malayalam producers borrow from just four or five private financiers at interest rates that would make loan sharks blush—20-25%. Many end up bankrupt, their artistic dreams sacrificed at the altar of compound interest.

In one way, Suresh Kumar and his peers are reaping what they have sown. Like today’s OTT bubble, satellite television created a similar windfall at the start of the millennium, delivering huge profits for makers, actors and producers. Kumar particularly scored big during this period as one of Mohanlal’s main producers, until the actor began producing films himself.

These fault lines erupted recently when Suresh Kumar publicly revealed the budget of Empuraan, starring superstar Mohanlal and directed by Prithviraj—a staggering Rs 140 crore, making it the most expensive Malayalam film ever. Kumar suggested that Tamil Nadu-based Lyca Productions, which recently suffered massive losses from Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan starrers, was being “duped” into the Kerala market with promises of returns that don’t exist.

This ignited a firestorm. Antony Perumbavoor, Mohanlal’s long-time producer and confidant, issued a detailed rebuttal that was later shared by both Prithviraj and Mohanlal. Despite Kumar and Mohanlal being schoolmates and former collaborators, the controversy revealed a deeper schism—not between old friends, but between competing visions for Malayalam cinema’s future.

“The fight is not among them, but between an old guard and a new guard,” says an industry insider. Filmmakers like Prithviraj are charting a new territory, creating big-budget spectacles with global ambitions. “Empuraan’s cinematography is conceived with a worldwide audience in mind. The director wasn’t afraid to hire helicopters for action sequences, while the average Malayalam producer thinks twice before renting a Range Rover,” says someone from the production team.

Interestingly, amid this financial carnage, some of the industry’s biggest hits recently were produced not by traditional studios but by actors and directors themselves. Manjummel Boys came from actor Soubin Shahir and his circle under Parava Films. Premalu (along with critics’ darlings like Kumbalangi Nights and Joji) emerged from the creative triumvirate of actor-director Dileesh Pothan, writer Syam Pushkaran and Faasil.

This shift reveals two simultaneous truths: established producers are becoming increasingly risk-averse toward experimental content, and creative talents are seeking autonomy over their artistic visions.

Superstar Mammootty’s production company exemplifies this evolution. Through Mammootty Kampany, the veteran actor has systematically shattered his macho image, portraying characters who cry, experience loss, engage in explicit sexuality, commit honour killings and even come out as gay. In films like Rorschach, Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam and Kaathal, Mammootty seems to be redefining what Malayalam cinema can explore.

Would traditional producers have green-lit these boundary-pushing projects? The evidence suggests otherwise. Other artist-led production companies also claim they are filling a creative void left by risk-averse legacy producers, even as they navigate the same treacherous financial landscape.

They believe this is an evolutionary phase of Malayalam cinema as it attempts to transform itself, reaching for audiences beyond Kerala’s borders. This ambition demands bigger stars, higher production values and technical crews of international calibre—all of which cost substantial sums that the traditional financing model cannot sustain. The legacy producers, the new guard believes, are not in sync with this new grammar of cinema trade and most have lost touch with ground reality both in terms of content and structure.

Beyond these creative tensions, the industry’s structural problems extend beyond Kerala’s borders. None of the mainstream OTT platforms have appointed decision-makers who can green-light Malayalam projects independently. Approval must come from Mumbai—a process that reveals either a fundamental lack of trust in local talent or a cynical assessment of the market’s importance. Either way, it creates additional hurdles for an already struggling industry.

What makes this situation particularly ironic is that all of this is happening in an industry that remains one of the most disorganized (most sets don’t even have a washroom for women), exploitative and poorly paying to writers, technicians and crew in India.

The fundamental problem, everybody agrees, is mathematical— Kerala’s cinematic brilliance is trapped in a population constraint. With just 3.5 crore people in the state and industry estimates suggesting only 50 lakh regular moviegoers, the numbers don’t add up. The theoretical best-case calculation is if every regular movie goer watches a film (indicating pan-state acclaim), at Rs 200 per ticket, the film might gross Rs 100 crore.

From that theoretical maximum, subtract 30% for taxes and 30-40% for distributors, and producers are left with Rs 20-25 crore before deducting marketing expenses. Now consider that most Rs 100 crore grossers require star power—actors now commanding fees in crores—along with top-tier directors, technicians and even screenwriters (at least one recently charged over Rs 1 crore for a script). Add production schedules stretching 60-90 days, and your budget easily exceeds Rs 20 crore.

Where exactly is the sustainable financial model here? Even in the best-case scenario, producers are barely breaking even. Most films achieve only a fraction of that theoretical maximum, guaranteeing financial disaster. In January 2025, out of 28 films released, only Asif Ali’s Rekhachithram turned a profit, with the industry losing Rs 110 crore in a month, as per KFPA. For 2024, the industry released 200 films with only 24 achieving financial success, resulting in losses of Rs 600-700 crore.

This means for Malayalam cinema to endure this transition, it needs more than just critical adulation and festival laurels. It needs a structural reset. The unchecked rise of actor fees must be reevaluated, ensuring that the burden of failure isn’t shouldered by producers alone. Financial institutions need to step in with saner lending rates before private financiers choke the industry’s future.

OTT platforms, if they truly value Malayalam cinema’s storytelling prowess, must establish regional decision-making bodies rather than treat the industry as an afterthought in Mumbai’s corporate boardrooms. Most importantly, producers must recognize that the age-old financing models— where success relies solely on Kerala’s limited theatrical audience—are no longer viable.

At the heart of it, the industry must decide what it truly wants to be. Right now, it’s like a half-baked screenplay— beautifully shot, critically acclaimed but structurally unsound. And as any filmmaker knows, no amount of festival buzz can save a story with a broken third act. Does it aspire to remain a niche darling of cinephiles and award circuits, or does it have the vision—and the discipline—to build an ecosystem that thrives both artistically and commercially?

Because right now, nobody loves Malayalam cinema—if you ask the people who produce it.

The writer is a Kerala-based journalist