In 2008, Malayali audiences witnessed something they had never experienced before—a movie that brought together all their favorite stars, from Mohanlal, Mammootty, and Suresh Gopi to Dileep, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Nayanthara, and many others. The film Twenty:20 turned out to be a huge success, but since then, no other movie has quite captured the perfect multi-starrer essence. Now, as Mahesh Narayanan gears up for his highly anticipated multi-starrer project featuring Mohanlal and Mammootty in the lead roles, let’s take a look at whether multi-starrer films are still relevant in Mollywood.
Legendary ‘Padayottam’
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Apart from being the first 70 mm movie in south India, the director Jijo Punnoose has made another achievement with the 1982 film ‘Padayottam’ as it marked the team of several legendary actors Prem Nazir, Madhu, Lakshmi, Shankar, Mohanlal, Mammootty, Jalaja, Sukumari, and many more. The movie could be even termed as the first big-budget multi-starrer film in Mollywood. In one way, ‘Padayottam’ incepted the idea of bringing together all the stars in one film.
Love for Harikrishnans
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The Malayali audiences first saw a perfect multi-starrer in Fazil’s directorial Harikrishnans. The movie features Mammootty and Mohanlal as Hari and Krishna, along with the Bollywood icon Juhi Chawla. What made Harikrishnans special was the perfect screenplay that gave space to both the legendary actors. Even the dialogues and the screen space for Mohanlal and Mammootty seem to have been carefully planned to satisfy the fans of both actors and also not by affecting the story flow. Harikrishnans is truly a guidebook on how to present actors with huge fan bases on screen without being partial to any one party.
‘Harikrishnans was a big challenge’ – director Fazil
The ‘Harikrishnans’ director Fazil revealed that teaming up with the biggest superstars Mammootty and Mohanlal for ‘Harikrishnans’ posed a huge challenge for him. In a chat with Grihalakshmi, Fazil said that while Mohanlal was already known and experienced in delivering comedies, it was unexpected from Mammootty who used to do serious roles in films. “I never thought that Mammootty would be doing comedy and dance with such perfection in the movie, he was usually known for his serious roles,” said Fazil in the interview. Fazil also revealed that Mammootty and Mohanlal were competing in their performances. Whenever Mohanlal did comedy, Mammootty immediately matched it with his performance. “In the song sequence, both of them stood firmly, equally matching each other. If one of them had stepped back due to any kind of complexity, I would have struggled,” says Fazil. “But that didn’t happen.”
From ‘Swapnakoodu’ to ‘Bangalore Days’
Not only Mammootty and Mohanlal shined in multi-starrer projects, but several young actors including Prithviraj Sukumaran, Kunchacko Boban, Jayasurya, Dulquer Salman, Nivin Pauly, Asif Ali, and others entertained the audiences with multi-starrer projects including ‘Swapnakoodu’, ‘Bangalore Days’, ‘Classmates’, ‘Traffic’ and others. The majority of these films genuinely utilized the factors of each other that the audiences loved and turned out to be superhits.
A decline in multi-starrer trend
Slowly the audiences started to divert from movies that simply use stardom to attract them. For example, films like ‘Kammath & Kammath’, ‘Cousins’, ‘King and the Commissioner’, simply relied on star power than the content which lead to the audiences losing interest in such films.
Kickstarting the multistarrer trend
After a hiatus, Vineeth Sreenivasan again kickstarted the multi-starrer trend with his recent film ‘Varshangalkku Shesham’. Packed with the new generation actors Pranav Mohanlal, Nivin Pauly, Dhyan Sreenivasan, Kalyani Priyadarshan, Asif Ali, Neeraj Madhav, and many others, ‘Varshangalkku Shesham’ enjoyed a decent theatrical run which reminisced the audiences of the good old multistarrer trend in Mollywood.
I intended to approach both Mohanlal and Sreenivasan – Vineeth Sreenivasan
Vineeth Sreenivasan revealed that he wanted to cast Mohanlal and Sreenivasan in the second part of ‘Varshangalkku Shesham’ as the older versions of the characters played by Pranav Mohanlal and Dhyan Sreenivasan. In a talk with On the Dot Media, Vineeth said, “If you look at the dialogues in the latter part of Varshangalkku Shesham, there are several instances where one character playfully teases the other. It would have been wonderful to see Lal uncle and my dad perform these exchanges. However, due to my father’s declining health, this wasn’t possible. Despite this, I kept the original dialogues in the script, as they felt genuine and stayed true to the characters as envisioned.”.
Vineeth Sreenivasan’s words mark the fact that there is a rising demand among audiences to witness their favorite stars teaming up for a movie.
Cinema strike
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Malayalam film producer Suresh Kumar recently revealed in a press meet that there will be a total shut down for all film activities starting from June 1 this year. Citing the reason, he said that majority of the Malayalam films have tanked recently and in the month of January only one movie did good box office collections. He also said that the remuneration for the actors and technicians have sky rocketed and many producers are now in crisis.
All hopes on Mahesh Narayanan’s multi starrer
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The Malayali audiences are all set to witness the most awaited multi starrer project which teams up the actors Mohanlal, Mammootty, Kunchacko Boban, Nayanthara, Fahadh Faasil, and several others in lead roles. The movie is touted to be a big-budget action thriller. The movie which is an unconventional film will be shot in Sri Lanka, London, Abu Dhabi, and several cities in India.
All being said, it doesn’t matter whether a project is packed with all the actors who have superstardom. For any movie to succeed, especially in Kerala, the content surely plays a pivotal role.