Everyone thinks we write cheques and get out of the way. That’s the myth destroying our industry.
Ask anyone on a Tamil film set who the producer is, and they’ll point to the person who isn’t there.
That’s the joke. It’s also the problem.
In the popular imagination — and frankly in the imagination of too many people inside the industry — the producer is a financier. Someone who transfers money, attends the launch event, gets a credit, and then waits to see if they have anything left at the end. The creative people make the film. The producer makes the cheque.
I have spent twenty years proving that this is wrong. I am not sure it’s working.
What a producer actually does
A producer is, at their core, an architect of conditions.
They don’t write the line that makes an audience hold their breath. But they created the conditions under which that line could be written. They chose this director, this story, this cast. They protected the vision when the money got tight — and money always gets tight. They said no when the studio wanted a different ending. They said yes when the director needed one more day. They stood in rooms where the film’s survival was being decided and made sure the right thing survived.
None of this is visible on screen. Very little of it is visible at all.
When I produced Maadathy: An Unfairy Tale with director Leena Manimekalai, my central job for years was to protect the film from the forces that wanted to make it safer. More palatable. Less itself. The story of the Puthirai Vannaar — a Dalit caste designated as “unseeable” — is not comfortable material. There were a hundred moments where a less committed producer would have blinked. I didn’t blink. That choice, invisible to any audience member watching the film at Busan or on Prime Video, is the most important thing I contributed.
That is producing. And it looks nothing like writing a cheque.
The star salary crisis is a producer failure — and we need to own it
Here’s the hot take: the current crisis in Tamil cinema is substantially a failure of producers. Not of stars. Not of directors. Of us.
The data is not subtle. In 2025, major OTT platforms slashed acquisition prices for Tamil films by 40 to 50 percent compared to 2024 levels. Tamil Nadu released 241 new films in 2024 — the Tamil Film Active Producers Association’s own analysis says the market can absorb at most 150. The top Tamil stars command between ₹110 crore and ₹250 crore per film. Thug Life, one of the most anticipated films of 2025, earned under ₹100 crore worldwide against a ₹200–250 crore budget. Vidaamuyarchi, budgeted at ₹185–225 crore, grossed around ₹135–140 crore.
Who signed off on those budgets? Who agreed to those star salaries? Who greenlit 241 films into a market that could only sustain 150?
Producers did.
The Tamil Film Producers Council’s landmark November 2025 resolution — requiring stars to shift from full upfront payment to revenue sharing, extending OTT windows to six to eight weeks, creating screen allocation committees — is the right response. But it is a response to a problem that producers created. We were so desperate to attach a bankable name, so convinced that a star’s fee was the price of entry, that we hollowed out our own economics.
The star salary arms race was never forced on us. We chose it, deal by deal, over twenty years. And now we are standing in the wreckage of that choice asking the stars to take less.
We stopped backing judgment and started buying insurance
Here is what actually changed.
In an earlier era of Tamil cinema, a producer with a strong sensibility would back a story because they believed in it. The bet was on the material and the filmmakers. Stars were cast to serve the story.
At some point — I watched this happen in real time — the logic inverted. Stars stopped serving stories. Stories started serving stars. The producer’s job became assembling the right “combination” — star, director, music composer — that would satisfy distributors and OTT buyers before a single frame was shot.
This is not filmmaking. It is insurance procurement.
And the insurance has stopped paying out. OTT platforms that once paid premium prices for star-attached content are now, as of late 2025, offering less for star-driven films and more interest in small-budget, fresh, distinctive content. They are demanding 25-day certified box office auditor reports before finalising digital deals. They are cutting license periods from three to five years down to one year. The market is pricing films on actual performance, not on the name above the title.
The market is punishing the insurance mindset. Slowly. Painfully. Correctly.
What independent producers knew all along
Independent cinema operates on judgment, always. There is no star to buy insurance from. There is no established brand. You back the story and the filmmaker, and you live or die by the quality of those choices.
Maadathy went to Busan because it was the film it needed to be. Sengadal traveled because it was honest in a way that had nowhere to hide. These are not accidents of taste. They are the results of producing decisions made from conviction rather than calculation.
The commercial Tamil film industry is now being forced — by market collapse, by OTT repricing, by audience exhaustion — to rediscover what independent producers never forgot: that the only sustainable bet in this business is a good story, well told.
I have been making that bet for twenty years. I intend to keep making it.
The producer is not the person who writes the cheque. The producer is the person who decides what the cheque is for. That decision — quiet, invisible, taken in rooms most people never see — is everything.
— Elango Raghupathy
Producer · Co-Founder, Karuvachy Films · elangoraghupathy.com