‘Vakeel Saab’ to ‘Narappa’, the travesty of remakes in a digital era

Can remakes work when original films are easily available on digital platforms? A look at the recent Telugu remakes — ‘Vakeel Saab’, ‘Narappa’, ‘Thimmarusu’ and ‘Ishq’

A casual glance at the recent Telugu films cannot go past the remakes. Pawan Kalyan-starrer Vakeel Saab, the remake of the 2016 Hindi film Pink, was a crowd puller before cinema halls were closed for the second wave of COVID-19. Theatres in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh reopened last week after three months, to screen two remakes — Thimmarusu (from the 2019 Kannada film Birbal) and Ishq, based on the 2019 Malayalam film of the same name. A few days earlier, vying for attention on the digital space was the Venkatesh starrer Narappa, the Telugu version of the 2019 Tamil film Asuran. The timing of all these remakes may be purely incidental but it has made film enthusiasts ask if there’s a dearth of original stories in one of the biggest film industries in the country.