Disney+ Hotstar bolsters southern slate with new Malayalam original ‘Master Peace’
Disney+ Hotstar has announced an addition to its southern language slate—a new Malayalam original called Master Peace starring Sharaf U Dheen, Renji Panicker, Maala Parvathi, Shanthi Krishna, and Asokan, among others. It will also be available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali and Marathi. Video streaming platforms are likely to offer 50-60% of the budgets to southern language content, with these programmes seeing much traction, accounting for 30% of OTT viewership, said industry experts.
Films like RRR, Beast, and Jana Gana Mana were big hits on Netflix last year, and Amazon Prime Video saw high interest for its Tamil original Suzhal. Producers and executives also said the other advantage is southern originals are easy to put together as talent costs are not as high as Hindi content. It is estimated that 50% of overall subscription growth in 2022 came from the five markets down south.
RRR (on ZEE5, Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar), Karthikeya 2, Valimai and Bimbisara were watched the most and thrillers such as Vilangu and Recce have been well received along with comedies like Aha Naa Pellanta as well as Hello World. RRR, in fact, was the most popular film from India on Netflix globally. Within its first four weeks on the service, the film was viewed for over 73 million hours across the world with more than two-thirds of viewing coming from outside India.
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