Few filmmakers have learned the unpredictability of the box office as thoroughly as Priyadarshan. Speaking at a technical roundtable hosted by Cue Studio on June 15, the veteran director said that after four decades and dozens of hits, he has simply stopped trying to predict what audiences will embrace — because the films he was surest about have flopped, and the ones he doubted have become classics.
Priyadarshan said he has never planned his career as a strategy. He takes each film as it comes, and doesn’t much care whether a script is wholly original or a remake. What matters to him is whether he feels an emotional pull toward the characters. That instinct, he admitted, has produced both some of his biggest successes and some of his most surprising failures.
Two films, two very different outcomes
To make his point, he revisited two of his mid-1990s collaborations with Mohanlal. The first was Mithunam (1993), a family satire co-starring Urvashi and written by Sreenivasan, about a middle-class man fighting through red tape to start a biscuit factory. The team, he said, was completely convinced it would break records. It didn’t — the film underperformed, leaving the crew baffled.
The opposite happened with Thenmavin Kombath (1994). Priyadarshan said he was full of doubt during the shoot, unsure whether its folklore-heavy, stylised village world would land with city audiences. Instead, the Mohanlal–Shobana film became a massive hit, ran for months, and won two National Awards, including a cinematography prize for debutant K.V. Anand, with a hugely popular score by Berny–Ignatius. The contrast, he said, is a permanent reminder that the final verdict always belongs to the audience.
A 100th film with his first leading man
Priyadarshan’s current focus is a milestone: his 100th film as director. The project is set up at Aashirvad Cinemas, produced by Antony Perumbavoor with co-producer Binu George Alexander, and is being tracked under the code #AVD38.
Fittingly, it will once again star Mohanlal — the same actor who led Priyadarshan’s very first film, the 1984 comedy Poochakkoru Mookkuthi. Reaching 100 films with the same leading man you started with, the director noted, is a record unlikely to be matched.
This time, the two are stepping away from the heavy visual effects of their 2021 war epic Marakkar: Arabikadalinte Simham. Priyadarshan said the new film moves away from his familiar comedy territory toward a serious human drama built around music and grounded action. He is reassembling his crew in Kochi, fresh off a return to Bollywood — the horror-comedy Bhooth Bangla with Akshay Kumar and producers Shobha and Ekta Kapoor — which ended a 14-year gap from Hindi cinema.
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