From Drishyam to Manjummel Boys, how budget discipline and writer-led filmmaking built India’s most consistent cinema machine, one tightly written screenplay at a time.
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‘Drishyam 3′ releases in theatres on May 21, 2026, Mohanlal’s 66th birthday. It is the third chapter of a franchise that began in 2013 with a quiet, low-budget film about a cable TV operator trying to protect his family. That film ran for 150 days in theatres. It was remade in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Sinhala, and Chinese. It became the template for what Indian crime writing could look like without guns, chases, or a single item number.
This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern baked into Malayalam cinema.
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Start with the box office, because the numbers are genuinely hard to believe.
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‘Premalu’ was made on a budget of under ₹10 crore. It grossed ₹132.79 crore worldwide. That is a return of 745.5%, the highest profit margin of any Indian film in 2024.
‘Manjummel Boys’, a survival drama about a group of friends from Ernakulam stuck in a cave, was made on approximately ₹20 crore. It grossed ₹241.10 crore worldwide. It became the highest-grossing Malayalam film of all time. Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth reportedly called the film team personally to congratulate them.
‘Aavesham’ grossed ₹155 crore worldwide. ‘Aadujeevitham: The Goat Life’ crossed ₹158 crore. In 2024 alone, 26 Malayalam films crossed the ₹10 crore mark, double the number from the previous year, according to Bollywood Hungama.
The industry’s total box office gross went from ₹147 crore in 2020 to ₹1,165 crore in 2024. That is a nearly 800% increase in four years. Audience footfalls grew from 2.3 crore to 12.6 crore in the same period.
In 2025, ‘Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra’, a superhero film, became only the second Malayalam film to cross ₹100 crore in Kerala alone. It also crossed ₹100 crore in overseas markets. The film has been called by several critics the best Indian film of that year.
These are not a series of lucky hits. This is a functioning system.
Before ‘Drishyam’ arrived in December 2013, Malayalam cinema was successful regionally but not nationally dominant. The film changed that in one season.
Jeethu Joseph wrote and directed the film on a modest budget and set it in a small coastal town in Kerala. The story followed Georgekutty, a cable TV operator, not a cop, not a spy, trying to cover up a crime committed by his family. No villain with a lair. No action hero. Just a frightened man and a clever mind.
‘Drishyam’ became the first Malayalam film to cross ₹50 crore worldwide. More importantly, it altered how the rest of India looked at Malayalam storytelling. Long before “content cinema” became a national buzzword, ‘Drishyam’ proved that a tightly written screenplay could outperform spectacle. It also demonstrated something that Bollywood spent the next decade struggling to absorb: that audiences will root for a morally compromised protagonist if the writing makes them feel what that character feels.
The Hindi remake starred Ajay Devgn. The Telugu version starred Venkatesh. Both were successful. Neither replaced the original in cultural memory. The story belongs to Malayalam cinema, and the audience knows it.
‘Drishyam 2’ released directly on Amazon Prime Video in February 2021 during the pandemic. It was the most-watched film on the platform in India that week.
Malayalam cinema’s structural advantage is financial discipline.
The average budget of a mainstream Malayalam hit is a fraction of what Bollywood or Telugu cinema spends on comparable films. ‘Premalu’ under ₹10 crore. ‘Manjummel Boys’ approximately ₹20 crore. Even ‘Lucifer’, the 2019 political action film that became the first Malayalam film to cross ₹200 crore worldwide, was made on a budget that Telugu or Bollywood studios would consider mid-range.
This constraint forces a specific kind of storytelling. You cannot hide a weak script behind a ₹300 crore VFX budget. You cannot paper over thin characters with stadium-scale action sequences. When the money runs out at ₹15 crore, the only thing left to spend is time, on the screenplay.
The result is a culture where the writer-director is central. Jeethu Joseph writes and directs. Chidambaram, who made ‘Manjummel Boys’, wrote and directed. Lijo Jose Pellissery, who made ‘Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam’ and ‘Churuli’, writes and directs.
Malayalam cinema dominates in a specific set of genres, all of them dependent on writing more than scale.
The first is the domestic thriller. ‘Drishyam’, its sequels, ‘Memories’, ‘Neru’. These are films where the tension comes entirely from character decisions and consequences. No car chases. The suspense is whether the audience knows more or less than the protagonist.
The second is the survival drama.’Manjummel Boys’, ‘Aadujeevitham’, ‘2018: Everyone is a Hero’. These films take real events and turn physical ordeal into emotional narrative. The survival is never just physical. It is always about relationships.
The third is comedy. ‘Aavesham’, ‘Premalu’, ‘Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil’. Malayalam filmmakers have figured out how to make comedy that is rooted in recognisable social detail rather than punchlines. The laughs come from character, not from jokes.
In 2025, ‘Lokah Chapter 1’ added a fourth: the superhero saga. It earned ₹302 crore worldwide, the highest-ever for a Malayalam film. It did this while also being, by most critical accounts, a genuinely original work rather than a Marvel imitation.
Hindi cinema has tried to replicate the Malayalam formula. The ‘Drishyam’ remakes were successful. ‘Andhadhun’, a thriller made in 2018, was also widely compared to the Malayalam school of writing. But the systematic output that Malayalam delivers, multiple intelligent films per year, across different genres, has not been replicated at scale.
Part of this is structural. Bollywood’s star ecosystem creates a situation where the star’s image requirements can override the script’s logic. A major star cannot play a loser convincingly if his contract requires him to win all his fights. A major star’s fee leaves so little budget for everything else that the film has to recoup on opening weekend, eliminating the slow word-of-mouth burn that Malayalam films depend on.
Malayalam cinema does not have that problem. Mohanlal is a superstar, but he played Georgekutty, a man who gets beaten by cops, lies to his family, and hides a body, without a single scene of redemptive heroism in the conventional sense. The character works because the script protects the character’s moral complexity, not the actor’s image.
That is a level of creative control that most other industries do not allow.
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