Kollywood has suddenly discovered that sports-based films can be a winning formula at the box office. The success of the Sivakarthikeyan-produced Kanaa on the triumph of a farmer’s daughter in international women’s cricket formed the core of the film. Kanaa, which was made on a shoestring budget of ₹3.5 crore, has taken a distributor share of approximately ₹7 crore from Tamil Nadu. Clearly, a sign that sports is doing well on the big screen as well.
With the IPL 2019 season and ICC World Cup around the corner, it looks like Kollywood too wants to cash in on the sports scene. There are a handful of films lined up this year where “sports is the real hero”. They’re in various stages of production — Vijay’s Atlee-directed Thalapathy 63, Susienthiran-directed Kennedy Club, Kathir’s Jada , Arun Vijay’s Boxer , Jai’s untitled film with Gopi Nainar and Susienthiran’s Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu 2 (See Box). Meanwhile, Jiiva is playing opening batsman Krishnamachari Srikkanth in the Hindi sports film 1983, the year India won the World Cup for the first time. And Keerthy Suresh will make her Bollywood debut as Ajay Devgn’s wife in a film about India’s well-known football coach Syed Abdul Rahim.
Bollywood has had a link with sports-based films for a while now; examples are Lagaan (2001), Chak De! India (2007 ), Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), Mary Kom (2014), MS Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016), Sultan (2016) and the biggest of them all is Dangal (2016), which collected over ₹2,000 crore worldwide.
Currently, nearly a dozen Hindi biopics or events based on sports personalities are in various stages of production. There are three biopics on badminton personalities — Saina Nehwal, Pullela Gopichand and PV Sindhu — in the pipeline.
Over the years, the sports genre has worked big time at the Tamil Nadu box-office too. The difference between Hindi and Tamil sports-based films is that in Kollywood, they don’t make pure biopics as they feel it will tank. A popular director confessed, “You can never make a pure sports biopic on, say a popular cricketer like Krishnamachari Srikkanth, in Tamil. It will never work, if it is not sugar-coated with drama and masala ingredients. What happened to Aishwarya Dhanush’s biopic on high jumper Mariyappan Thangavelu who won the gold in Rio Paralympics? We are never going to get rid of the song-and-dance routine. Without them, it becomes like a documentary. Distributors will refuse it, saying that it will not run in B and C markets. More than 60% of distributor share for Kanaa came from small towns and rural areas as it had human emotions, father-daughter sentiments and farmer issue at the core of its storytelling.”
So, Kollywood directors prefer taking a sports-based theme and packaging it along with commercial ingredients like romance, songs, comedy, fights and father/mother/sister sentiments. For sports-based films in Tamil, the key ingredient is the triumph of the underdog. Some of the most successful Tamil films which had sports as its core theme packaged with entertainment factors are Ghilli (2004), M Kumaran Son Of Mahalakshmi (2004), Chennai 600028 (2007), Vennila Kabaddi Kuzhu (2009), Aadukalam (2011), Ethir Neechal (2013), Jeeva (2014) and Irudhi Suttru (2016).
Thadam star Arun Vijay’s next is Boxer, a sports film. He says, “I play an MMA boxer who, due to circumstances, disciplines himself and goes on to represent India internationally. It is directed by debutant Vivek who has brought an emotional connect to the narration.” Veteran director Dharani, who made Ghilli, considered one of the most successful sports films in Tamil, concludes, “Since the genre involves someone fighting against all odds for victory, it seems tailor-made for mass audiences. If you throw in the commercial ingredients in such a storyline, it can turn into a complete masala entertainer.”
