The Malayalam movie Drishyam, which had Mohanlal and Meena play the lead pair, became a blockbuster and went on to be remade in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi. In fact, the film went on to become huge hits in all the languages.
Now, we hear from its director, Jeethu Joseph that the Chinese remake rights of Drishyam have been bagged by a Chinese production house. Announcing it on a social networking site, the director pointed out that this is the first time a Chinese production house has procured the remake rights of an Indian movie.
Interestingly, the film was remade in Sinhalese under the title Dharmayudhaya. Written and directed by Jeethu Joseph, Drishyam has been produced by Antony Perumbavoor under his banner Aashirvad Cinemas.
The film was made on a budget of Rs 5 crores and went on to fetch its filmmakers about Rs. 750 mn worldwide. In fact, Drishyam was the first Malayalam film to cross the Rs. 50 crore mark and it managed to hold on to the screens for more than 150 days. The star cast of the film also had Ansiba Hassan, Esther Anil, Asha Sarath, Siddique, and Kalabhavan Shajon with Mohanlal and Meena playing the lead pair.
It may be mentioned here that Drishyam’s Tamil version was titled Papanasam and it had Kamal Haasan and Gauthami play the lead pair while in Telugu it was Venkatesh and Meena. The Hindi version had Ajay Devgn reprise Mohanlal’s role. With Drishyam turning out to be massive hits in all the languages that it was released, the filmmakers are hopeful that it will strike a chord with Chinese film buffs as well. With Indian films such as Aamir Khan’s Dangal doing well in the Chinese box office recently, there are high hopes on this remake scoring it big.
(Content provided by Digital Native)