Pan-India before pan-India: Malayalam cinema comes full circle with Drishyam 3

Long before the term “pan-India cinema” became everyone's favourite buzzword, Malayalam cinema was already doing it. Quietly. Organically. For decades. Without ever announcing it from the rooftops.

There were no carefully strategised multilingual release plans. No promotional campaigns repeatedly reminding audiences that a film was made for all of India. No desperate attempts to garner universal appeal through scale and spectacle – be it in the '90s or just a few years ago.

Malayalam cinema simply focused on telling good stories, and somehow, those stories travelled farther than anyone imagined. That journey perhaps comes full circle with Mohanlal and director Jeethu Joseph's Drishyam 3.

Today, the phrase “pan-India film” immediately brings to mind giant action spectacles mounted on massive budgets, stars delivering punch-dialogues in slow motion, films simultaneously dubbed into five languages, and cross-industry collaborations of actors and technicians. But Malayalam cinema is built differently. It never chased attention. It just concentrated on rooted emotions that naturally appeal to the larger masses.

And that difference matters. Because even now, when industries consciously attempt to manufacture pan-India appeal with flashy budgets and manufactured stories, Malayalam cinema continues doing what it has always done best: making stories deeply rooted in local culture that somehow end up feeling universal. Though recent years have seen some Malayalam films consciously engineered for pan-India appeal, a larger section of the industry still believes in one reality: emotion and writing matter more than scale.

Before pan-India was even a business model

In many ways, Malayalam cinema understood something that Indian cinema is still trying to learn. Audiences do not connect with films because they are designed to travel, but because the emotions inside them feel honest. It is these emotions that do the talking, not the scale or the spectacle orchestrated on screen. There have been several examples that stand as a testament to this.

Take Shobana, Suresh Gopi, and Mohanlal's Manichitrathazhu as the foundational blueprint. When director Fazil made the psychological thriller in 1993, nobody marketed it as a crossover phenomenon. It was an intensely Malayali film rooted in Kerala’s social fabric, traditions, architecture, and family structures. The humour was local, the emotional rhythms were local, and even its understanding of mental health came from a distinctly Indian cultural lens.

And yet, the story refused to remain confined to one language.

Over the next decade, Manichitrathazhu was remade into Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi. It took over ten years, but even then, the story never aged. The Tamil version, Chandramukhi starring Rajinikanth, Jyotika, and Prabhu, became one of Tamil cinema’s biggest blockbusters, while the Hindi adaptation, Bhool Bhulaiyaa starring Vidya Balan and Akshay Kumar, became iconic enough to launch an entire franchise of its own.

Nobody sat in a boardroom discussing the strategy for potential remakes or pan-India attention. The story simply travelled because it was too compelling to stay in one language. That became Malayalam cinema’s defining strength: storytelling with universally recognisable emotions, sometimes hyperlocal and sometimes entirely universal.

Drishyam and the birth of the modern pan-India thriller

Then came Drishyam in 2013, and even today, it remains fascinating how small the film actually is on paper. It features a cable TV operator, a middle-class family man, an accidental murder, and a cover-up. There are no superheroes here, no mythological scale, and no extravagant world-building. Just a middle-class family navigating their way through an accidental crime. All emotion and no big staging.

I still remember my college days in the early 2010s when my professor picked Drishyam for a film studies class. A dimly-lit room, Mohanlal in all his glory, and Jeethu Joseph's twist-laden story. When Mohanlal's Georgekutty looks at the camera after burying the body of a young Varun Prabhakar—whom his daughter had accidentally killed—all of our jaws collectively dropped. Up until then, a thriller revolving around a middle-class family had never appealed to a wider audience quite the way Drishyam did.

And that is one of the primary reasons why Drishyam became one of the most remade Indian films in modern history.

Director Jeethu Joseph did not create Georgekutty as a typical mass hero; Mohanlal played him like an ordinary man surviving through intelligence, fear, and instinct. The film’s brilliance came from how emotionally accessible it was. Strip away the thriller mechanics, and Drishyam is fundamentally about one terrifying question: how far would a parent go to protect their child?

Every part of the country understood that fear, which is why the film worked all across India. Tamil cinema remade it with Kamal Haasan, Telugu cinema adapted it with Venkatesh Daggubati, and Hindi cinema turned it into a major franchise with Ajay Devgn, alongside Sinhala and even Chinese adaptations. Now, international audiences are gearing up for more local adaptations worldwide.

Perhaps the most important detail here is that the Malayalam original always remained the benchmark. That is rare in Indian cinema, where regional originals often disappear once bigger industries remake them. Drishyam’s Malayalam version retained its cultural authority because the writing itself was so precise.

By the time Drishyam 2 arrived during the Covid-19 pandemic, subtitles and the OTT boom had already changed audience behaviour completely. People no longer waited for remakes; they watched the Malayalam original itself on streaming platforms, discussed theories online, and compared future remakes against it.

Malayalam cinema was no longer India’s best-kept secret; it had become the industry everyone else was studying and looking up to.

The films that travelled before OTT arrived

The interesting thing is that Malayalam cinema’s national rise did not suddenly begin with streaming platforms, as the signs were visible much earlier.

Take Premam (2015), directed by Alphonse Puthren and starring Nivin Pauly, which became something larger than a blockbuster—it became a generational experience. The film had no grand narrative ambition, simply following a young man through three phases of love, heartbreak, and adulthood, but its emotional honesty made it impossible to resist. College students across South India connected with its awkwardness, humour, and nostalgia. The film also introduced Indian cinema to performers like Sai Pallavi, who would go on to become major stars.

In Tamil Nadu especially, Premam became a phenomenon, reportedly running for over 200 days in some theatres despite being a straight Malayalam release. That success mattered because it proved audiences were increasingly willing to embrace films outside their language if the storytelling connected emotionally.

Before Premam, there was Bangalore Days (2014) - starring Nivin Pauly, Dulquer Salmaan, and Nazriya Nazim - which found a massive young audience beyond Kerala through television and early streaming, as urban viewers connected deeply with its themes of friendship, kinship, migration, loneliness, and adulthood. Parvathy and Dulquer Salmaan's Charlie, released in 2015, similarly built a loyal following across states because of its whimsical storytelling and emotional warmth.

Malayalam cinema was slowly building something bigger than box office numbers - it was building trust. Audiences began entering Malayalam films with the assumption that the storytelling would be interesting, and that reputation eventually became invaluable. It was the growing availability of subtitles that brought these films to people who never knew the language.

In the early 2010s, Malayalam films travelled in three ways - through subtitles, dubbing, and remakes. But streaming platforms eventually changed that equation completely.

The OTT revolution changed everything

Then came the OTT platforms, and Malayalam cinema exploded not just nationally but internationally. Streaming fundamentally changed the ecosystem because accessibility was no longer a barrier. Earlier, remakes existed partly because audiences simply did not have easy access to regional originals. But once subtitles became a mainstream viewing culture, the need for remakes started decreasing, and Malayalam cinema benefited more than almost any other industry.

Films that may once have remained niche suddenly found nationwide audiences overnight.

The 2019 film Kumbalangi Nights became a turning point. Director Madhu C Narayanan created a deeply intimate story about masculinity, loneliness, and dysfunctional families set inside a coastal Kerala community, yet audiences across India emotionally connected with it because the relationships felt painfully real. Even today, if you ask for a recommendation for an introduction to Malayalam cinema, Kumbalangi Nights tops the list in the post-Covid era.

Then came The Great Indian Kitchen in 2021, in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, which sparked conversations nationwide about patriarchy, unpaid domestic labour, and the emotional exhaustion women experience inside marriage. The film travelled aggressively because its rage felt universal.

The 2021 film Joji, starring Fahadh Faasil, adapted Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a sharply local story about greed and toxic masculinity. Nayattu, which released the same year, exposed institutional corruption through a survival thriller rooted in Kerala politics and the police system. Meanwhile, Tovino Thomas and Basil Joseph's Minnal Murali proved Malayalam cinema could reinvent the superhero genre without losing its grounded emotional texture.

Even the 2019 film Jallikattu, India’s official Oscar entry, transformed a buffalo chase into a metaphor for human chaos and violence, becoming globally discussed not because it diluted its cultural identity, but because it leaned fully into it.

That became Malayalam cinema’s biggest paradox: the more local the storytelling felt, the more globally relatable it became.

Manjummel Boys, Premalu and the new generation

The recent wave of Malayalam blockbusters has only strengthened this phenomenon. Manjummel Boys (2024) became one of the biggest Malayalam hits ever despite being rooted in deeply specific friendship dynamics among Kerala youth. The survival drama connected so strongly across South India that theatres in Tamil Nadu witnessed extraordinary occupancy for a straight Malayalam release, working not on scale, but on pure emotion, focusing on friendship, guilt, and loyalty.

Similarly, Naslen and Mamitha Baiju's Premalu became a surprise nationwide favourite despite being an understated romantic comedy about awkward young adults navigating love in Hyderabad. Again, nothing about Premalu screamed pan-India blockbuster. There were no giant set-pieces or manufactured universal moments; it succeeded because the humour felt natural, and the relationships felt authentic.

Interestingly, many recent Malayalam films now travel without requiring remakes at all. That shift is significant because remakes previously acted as bridges between industries, whereas today, audiences increasingly prefer experiencing the original itself. Malayalam cinema perhaps benefited from this transition more than anyone else.

Why Malayalam cinema feels different

The reason Malayalam cinema consistently travels across borders may actually be very simple: it prioritises people over packaging.

Its characters feel recognisable, vulnerable, morally flawed, and all shades of black, white, and grey. Malayalam films are often unafraid of making their protagonists weak, insecure, or emotionally damaged, and their conflicts rarely emerge from mythology-sized stakes. Instead, they come from ordinary human fears like family pressure, loneliness, guilt, patriarchy, financial struggle, or emotional repression.

That realism creates emotional accessibility. Georgekutty from Drishyam is not a superhero, he is a frightened father; the women in The Great Indian Kitchen are not symbols, they feel painfully real; and the men in Kumbalangi Nights are broken, lonely, and emotionally immature in ways audiences instantly recognise. Even Kaathal – The Core dared to centre a homosexual protagonist in Mammootty’s Mathew Devassy - a level of emotional vulnerability mainstream commercial cinema rarely embraces.

The industry also collectively trusted and invested in writers more than formulas. While other industries increasingly chased spectacle-driven expansion, Malayalam filmmakers focused on narrative experimentation, layered characters, and emotional specificity.

Ironically, that authenticity became its biggest calling card because audiences today are exhausted by films constantly announcing their scale. They want emotional gravity, honesty, and stories that feel lived-in rather than manufactured for market penetration. Malayalam cinema consistently delivered, and how!

Drishyam 3 completes the circle

Which is why Mohanlal's Drishyam 3 feels symbolic beyond just being another sequel.

More than a decade after the first film released, Georgekutty’s story still commands nationwide curiosity, with audiences across India continuing to discuss theories, endings, and future possibilities surrounding a middle-class man from Kerala.

That itself says everything about Malayalam cinema’s journey. Drishyam was never designed as a pan-India cinematic universe, but it became one because audiences were emotionally invested in Georgekutty’s fear, guilt, and survival.

And perhaps that is Malayalam cinema’s greatest lesson to the rest of Indian cinema. Pan-India storytelling is not about scale; it is about emotional translation. A story does not become universal by removing cultural specificity; it becomes universal when the emotions inside it feel truthful enough for anyone, anywhere, to recognise themselves in it.

Malayalam cinema understood this long before the industry turned pan-India into a business strategy, and with Drishyam 3, that story has now come full circle. The film is currently running in theatres.