The Remake Rights Business in India: How Films Get Remade Across Languages (and Who Profits)

The film that launched a thousand remakes was not shot in Mumbai. It was shot in Thiruvananthapuram, cost about Rs 5 crore, and starred Mohanlal in one of the quietest, most devastating performances of his career. Drishyam (2013) has since been remade in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Sinhalese, Chinese, and twice in Hindi — the second time with Ajay Devgn reprising his own role from the first Hindi version. That is five remakes and counting, across five languages and two countries, from a single Malayalam film.

The remake rights business sits at one of the most fascinating intersections in Indian entertainment — where intellectual property meets cultural translation, where copyright law meets handshake deals, where a regional film that cost Rs 3 crore can generate Rs 15 crore in remake fees before a single frame of the new version is shot. And yet most people working in this industry — including many producers — have only a vague, secondhand understanding of how the machinery actually works.

We built AIO Cine because we kept running into producers, writers, and crew members who were getting burned by deals they didn't understand, opportunities they didn't know existed, and rights they didn't know they owned. The remake business is one of the clearest examples of that knowledge gap in action. So here is everything we know about it.

How the Indian Remake Ecosystem Works

India doesn't have one film industry. It has a loose federation of at least six major language industries — Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Bengali — plus a dozen or more active regional industries, all producing films for their own audiences while occasionally borrowing stories from each other.

The dominant flow, historically, has been South to North: Telugu originals get remade in Hindi, Tamil originals get remade in Telugu and Hindi, Malayalam originals get remade in Tamil and Telugu. The logic is economic. A Rs 3 crore Malayalam thriller that runs for 150 days in Kerala can be remade in Telugu with a star-studded cast for Rs 30 crore and target a market ten times the size. The math works for everyone involved, at least on paper.

But the flow goes in every direction. Agneepath (1990) was remade in 2012. Devdas has been remade more times than anyone has bothered to count. Kahaani (2012) was remade in Telugu as Drushyam — wait, no, different film. The point is that the remake economy is genuinely multilateral. Tamil remakes Telugu originals. Kannada remakes Tamil originals. Bengali remakes Hindi originals. The permutations are endless.

What drives the direction of traffic at any given moment? Three things: star systems, market size, and script scarcity. When a language industry is producing more stars than it has original content for, it imports stories. When a language market is large enough to justify a remake budget, it attracts remake interest from producers. When original scripts are thin — as they often are in Hindi cinema, which produces prestige originals but relies heavily on remakes for commercial volume — the appetite for buying South Indian remake rights goes up.

The Business of Buying Remake Rights

Who Sells, Who Buys

The remake rights to a film are typically owned by whoever owned the film's copyright at the time of production. In practice, this means the production company or the producer — not the director, not the writer, not the lead actor, unless specific contractual provisions were made at the time of original production.

This is a crucial distinction that many first-time filmmakers get wrong. If you directed a film that was produced by someone else's production company, and you did not negotiate a clause retaining remake rights, those rights belong to the producer. If you wrote the screenplay and sold it outright — which is the standard practice in India for screenwriters who are not simultaneously the director or producer — the remake rights to that story went with the sale.

The buyer is almost always a production company, not an individual. In the Hindi remake space, the major buyers have historically included companies like Excel Entertainment, Reliance Entertainment, Phantom Films (before its dissolution), and the banner arms of major studios. More recently, the OTT platforms have entered the remake rights acquisition game with real aggression — buying rights to South Indian hits to develop as Hindi web series rather than theatrical remakes.

Typical Deal Structures

Remake deals in India typically take one of three forms:

Flat fee plus profit share. The most common structure. The rights holder receives a flat payment upfront — anywhere from a few lakhs to several crores — in exchange for granting remake rights for a specific language and territory. The agreement may or may not include a backend percentage of the remake's profits. When it does include profit share, it is typically 2-5% of net profits, though "net profits" in any film deal is a number that can be engineered in many creative ways.

Percentage of original budget or production cost. Some deals price the remake rights as a percentage of the original film's production budget — typically 10-30%. This structure acknowledges the value of the original as proven creative IP. A film that cost Rs 5 crore to produce might command Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore in remake fees on this basis.

Revenue-based valuation. For films with exceptional box office performance, remake fees are sometimes calculated as a percentage of the original's gross. Baahubali: The Beginning generated such enormous revenue that rights discussions for various adaptations reportedly ran into the tens of crores. This is the exception, not the rule.

One thing that almost never happens in Indian remake deals: the original film's director or writer receiving any structured compensation from the remake, unless they negotiated it specifically and in writing at the time of the original deal. More on the ethics of this later.

Remake Rights Pricing: What Numbers Actually Look Like

Pricing in this market is opaque by design. Nobody publishes official rate cards, and the number that ends up in a deal is determined by a negotiation between parties with very different amounts of leverage. That said, broad market estimates exist among entertainment lawyers and agents who work in this space regularly.

Small regional language originals (budget under Rs 5 crore): Remake fees in the Rs 25 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore range. A Malayalam suspense thriller with strong word-of-mouth but modest box office typically falls here.

Mid-tier hits (box office Rs 20-100 crore): Remake fees of Rs 1.5 crore to Rs 5 crore. This is the most active part of the market. A Telugu action drama that cleaned up in Andhra-Telangana but hasn't crossed over nationally will attract serious Hindi remake interest in this range.

Major hits (box office Rs 100 crore+): Remake fees of Rs 5 crore to Rs 25 crore and above. Films at this level have the leverage to demand meaningful profit participation in addition to the flat fee.

OTT remake/adaptation rights: These are typically priced differently because OTT platforms are buying the story for development, not just a language translation. A web series adaptation rights deal can be structured as an option fee (Rs 10-25 lakh for 18-month exclusivity) plus a larger production rights fee if the platform greenlights the show.

All figures above are market estimates based on publicly reported deal discussions and entertainment industry practice as of early 2026. Actual deal terms vary significantly and should not be relied upon as authoritative without independent verification from an entertainment law professional.

Famous Remakes and Their Business Outcomes

Drishyam (2013 Malayalam original, multiple remakes)

The gold standard case study. The Telugu remake (Drushyam, 2014) reportedly earned Rs 70 crore worldwide against a budget under Rs 20 crore. The first Hindi remake (Drishyam, 2015) crossed Rs 100 crore. The second Hindi remake (Drishyam 2, 2022) crossed Rs 230 crore. The Chinese remake (Sheep Without a Shepherd, 2019) grossed over Rs 1,300 crore equivalent worldwide. A single original concept has generated what is probably Rs 2,000 crore+ in cumulative box office revenue across its life. The original Malayalam film cost Rs 5 crore to make.

Arjun Reddy (2017) / Kabir Singh (2019)

Sandeep Reddy Vanga both directed and owned the story of Arjun Reddy, putting him in a far stronger rights position than most Telugu filmmakers. The Hindi remake rights were reportedly acquired for a fee in the Rs 3-5 crore range. Kabir Singh opened to criticism but grossed Rs 379 crore — the highest-grossing Hindi remake of a South Indian film up to that point. Vanga went on to direct both the Telugu and Hindi versions himself, an unusual situation that gave him maximum creative and financial control.

Manichitrathazhu (1993) / Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007)

The Malayalam psychological thriller was remade in Tamil (Chandramukhi, 2005), Kannada, Telugu, and Hindi. Bhool Bhulaiyaa grossed Rs 120 crore and spawned its own franchise. The sequel (Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, 2022) grossed Rs 266 crore — and is technically a sequel to the Hindi remake of a 30-year-old Malayalam film, not a remake itself. By that point, the Hindi franchise had outgrown its source material entirely.

Temper (2015) / Simmba (2018)

The Telugu action drama was remade by Rohit Shetty in his signature cop universe. Simmba grossed Rs 400+ crore, making it the most commercially successful film Rohit Shetty had directed to that point. The story is a loose remake — the original's core revenge arc was retained while the aesthetic, tone, and universe integration were fully Bollywood-ized. Remake deals of this kind, where the Hindi adaptation departs significantly from the source, often trigger disputes about credit and compensation for the original creators.

The Legal Framework: Copyright Act, Remakes, and the Grey Zone

India's Copyright Act, 1957 (as amended in 2012) governs how films can and cannot be reproduced. A "remake" in copyright law is the production of a substantially similar work derived from the original — it constitutes copyright infringement unless the rights holder has granted permission.

The Act distinguishes between the screenplay, the dialogue, the underlying literary work (novel, short story), and the cinematograph film as separate copyrightable works. This creates complexity: a producer buying "remake rights" from a production company may have rights to the film as a whole but not to any underlying literary work the screenplay was based on. If the original screenplay was based on a novel, the novel's copyright holder needs to be involved in the deal independently.

The remake vs inspiration vs plagiarism spectrum

This is where things get genuinely murky in Indian film law. The Copyright Act protects expression, not ideas. You cannot copyright a plot, a theme, or a situation — only the specific expression of those elements in the original work.

In practice, this means a Hindi film can lift the central premise and narrative arc of a Telugu film without paying remake fees, as long as it changes enough of the specific expression. The question of "how much is enough" is never cleanly answered in Indian courts, which is precisely why so many Hindi films credit themselves as "loosely inspired by" a South Indian original while paying token fees — or none at all.

Kimi (Karan Arjun director David Dhawan remake culture) and dozens of others have benefited from this ambiguity. The standard test in Indian courts has been: does the ordinary viewer perceive substantial similarity? Is the overall feel of the film sufficiently similar to constitute infringement? This is inherently subjective and makes litigation expensive and unpredictable.

What constitutes copyright infringement in the remake context

Courts have held that copying a distinctive character, scene sequence, climactic structure, or unique narrative device from an original film can constitute infringement even if the dialogue and visual style differ. The more specific and distinctive the original work's creative choices, the stronger the infringement claim.

Legal disclaimer: Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice. Copyright and entertainment law in India is complex, jurisdiction-specific, and evolving. Producers, writers, and rights holders should consult a qualified entertainment lawyer before entering into or interpreting any rights agreement.

The Remake Rights Acquisition Process, Step by Step

For producers seriously looking to acquire remake rights to an existing film, here is how the process typically works in India:

Step 1: Identify and verify the rights holder. This sounds obvious but is frequently skipped. Who actually owns the remake rights? Is it the original production company? Did that company assign rights to a distributor as part of a distribution deal? Has the producer already sold remake rights in a particular language to someone else? This due diligence step requires checking the original film's production agreement, distribution agreements, and any existing licensing agreements. An entertainment lawyer should do this search, not the producer.

Step 2: Make an approach. The initial approach is usually informal — a phone call between producers, or an introduction through a shared agent or entertainment lawyer. At this stage, the buyer is signalling interest without committing to a price.

Step 3: Negotiate a term sheet. Before drafting a full agreement, the parties typically agree on key commercial terms: the fee, the territories covered (which languages and which countries), the exclusivity period, any profit participation, and credit obligations. This is where having a skilled entertainment lawyer is worth many times their fee.

Step 4: Due diligence on underlying rights. If the original film is based on any literary work — a novel, a play, a short story, a real case — the buyer must verify that the original producer had valid rights to that underlying material, and that those rights can be sub-licensed for the remake. This has caused deals to collapse at late stages when it emerges that the underlying rights were limited or have lapsed.

Step 5: Draft and execute the agreement. The full remake rights agreement should specify: the exact rights granted (remake in specified language, territory, and medium), the fee and payment schedule, profit participation terms, credit obligations, the treatment of any music or other copyrightable elements from the original, termination provisions, and dispute resolution mechanism.

Step 6: Register and protect. While India does not have a mandatory rights registry for film copyright assignments, the agreement should be stamped and notarised. Parties should also consider filing with the Copyright Office for additional protection, particularly for high-value deals.

Who Negotiates These Deals (and What It Costs)

Entertainment lawyers handle most serious remake rights negotiations in India. The major entertainment law practices are concentrated in Mumbai, with growing capacity in Hyderabad and Chennai as the South Indian industries have scaled.

Expect to pay Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh in legal fees for a remake rights agreement, depending on the complexity of the deal, the number of underlying rights issues, and the seniority of the lawyer involved. For major transactions, some lawyers charge a percentage of deal value (typically 1-3%) rather than a flat fee.

Talent agents and film agents also play a role in bringing deals together, particularly when the relationship requires an introduction — a Mumbai producer who doesn't have a direct line to a Hyderabad production company will typically go through an agent or a shared contact. Agent commissions on rights deals, when charged, typically run 5-10% of the fee received.

How Writers and Directors of Originals Get Compensated (or Don't)

This is the part of the remake business that should make every creative professional in India angry.

The Copyright Act, as amended in 2012, does include provisions giving screenwriters the right to claim royalties on certain kinds of exploitation of their work. The 2012 amendments were specifically intended to address the historical pattern of writers being paid once and then excluded from all downstream income from their work.

In practice, these provisions are almost entirely unenforced. The contractual norm in India is that screenwriters are hired on a work-for-hire basis, signing away all rights to their work in exchange for a flat fee. Even after the 2012 amendments, most production companies continue to use contracts that attempt to waive the writer's statutory royalty rights. Whether such waivers are legally effective is a matter of ongoing debate in Indian entertainment law circles.

The practical reality: if you wrote the original screenplay, and you sold it outright to a production company, and that company later sold remake rights to another producer, you will almost certainly receive nothing from the remake unless you specifically negotiated that right at the time of your original deal. The same is generally true of directors.

The Screenwriters Association (SWA) has been pushing for fairer treatment of writers in remake deals, and some more enlightened producers do include voluntary royalty arrangements. But this is the exception. The rule remains: get it in writing before you sign the original deal, or don't expect to see a rupee from the remake.

Is the Remake Market Dying?

The honest answer is: it's changing faster than it's dying, but the change is structural and permanent.

Five years ago, a Telugu audience who missed a film in theatres had to wait for the DVD or the satellite premiere. Today, they can watch it on Amazon Prime Video in 4K with subtitles within weeks of release. The psychological barrier that made remakes feel necessary — that Hindi audiences genuinely couldn't access South Indian films — has collapsed.

The evidence is visible in the numbers. Pushpa: The Rise ran in Hindi-dubbed form to Rs 100+ crore at the Hindi box office. KGF: Chapter 1 grossed Rs 250 crore in Hindi. RRR crossed Rs 274 crore in Hindi. These are not remake numbers — these are the original films, in translation, finding audiences that would previously have needed a remake to access them.

The audience has changed. A 22-year-old in Lucknow who watches Telugu films on OTT with subtitles doesn't need a Bollywood remake of Arjun Reddy — and when she does watch Kabir Singh, she knows exactly where it came from. The remake's cultural currency is lower than it used to be because the audience is more informed.

This does not mean the remake business is dead. It means the easy middle market is shrinking. Remakes that add genuine value — a different cultural inflection, a significantly elevated production value, a star who genuinely transforms the material — will continue to make commercial sense. Remakes that are pure arbitrage plays, translating a story from one language to another with no creative investment, will increasingly be punished by audiences who have already seen the original.

Simultaneous multilingual productions are the most significant structural response to this shift. Baahubali, RRR, Kalki 2898-AD, Pushpa 2 — these were all produced simultaneously in Telugu and Hindi (and often other languages), shot once with the same cast, and released nationally as equal versions. This eliminates the remake entirely. There is no rights negotiation, no second producer, no delay. The original production captures the full national market directly.

This model requires scale — you need a cast, crew, and infrastructure that can support multi-crore simultaneous multilingual production. Not every film can do it. But for the films that can, it's a fundamentally more economical and creatively coherent model than the remake system.

International Remakes: India as Exporter and Importer

Indian films have been adapted internationally more than most people realise. Sarkar (2005) was inspired by The Godfather. Don (1978) was so influential that it was remade domestically twice. But in the other direction — Indian originals adapted for international markets — the history is more modest.

The most significant export remake story is the Chinese adaptation of Drishyam (Sheep Without a Shepherd, 2019), which grossed approximately Rs 1,300 crore equivalent in China alone. It is perhaps the most commercially successful adaptation of an Indian film ever made.

Hollywood has shown periodic interest in Indian content but historically failed to execute. Adaptations of 3 Idiots, Special 26, and several other Indian films were announced and then quietly abandoned. The challenge is structural: Indian films are deeply rooted in a specific emotional register — joint family dynamics, musical interruptions, melodrama as a legitimate mode — that doesn't translate easily into Hollywood's tonal vocabulary.

The more promising direction is into other Asian markets. Korean, Thai, and Chinese film industries have shown genuine appetite for Indian story IP, and the cultural resonances between India and Southeast/East Asia are stronger than the cultural distance from Hollywood.

In the other direction, Indian remakes of Hollywood and Korean films have a long history. Ghajini (2008) was adapted from the Christopher Nolan Memento (though Nolan's camp disputes this). Multiple Korean thriller originals have been remade in Telugu and Tamil. The Korean content explosion that followed Parasite and Squid Game has accelerated this, with several Korean drama adaptations currently in development for Indian OTT platforms.

The Ethics Debate: Creative Bankruptcy vs Smart Business

The criticism of remake culture is that it represents the Indian film industry's unwillingness to invest in original storytelling. There is something to this. When a large production company's slate is 60% remakes, sequels, and franchise extensions, it is making a statement about its appetite for original creative risk.

But the counter-argument has merit too. Cultural translation is itself a creative act. A story about family honour and a double murder cover-up in coastal Kerala reads differently when transposed to UP or Maharashtra — the social context, the gender dynamics, the relationship between the individual and the state all shift. A skilled filmmaker remakes the story into something genuinely local and alive, not just a dubbed carbon copy.

The strongest critiques land not on the remake as a concept but on the specific failure mode of lazy remakes — scene-for-scene copies with no cultural intelligence, or productions that strip out everything that made the original distinctive in pursuit of a mass-market lowest common denominator. These exist, they are cynical, and they fail with the audiences they most deserve to fail with.

The most honest position: remake culture, done well, is a legitimate part of how stories travel across cultures. It becomes a problem when it crowds out the original storytelling pipeline by being cheaper and safer, because the long-term consequence is an industry that has lost the capacity to generate the originals that the remake ecosystem depends on.

Opportunities in the Remake Ecosystem for New Producers

If you are a new or emerging producer looking for an entry point into the remake space, here is where we see genuine opportunity in 2026.

Regional language to regional language. The most underdeveloped part of the remake market is remakes within the South Indian languages and between South Indian languages and the smaller regional markets (Odia, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Punjabi). A hit Tamil thriller might go for Rs 20 lakh in Odia remake rights — a number a new producer can actually raise, in exchange for story IP that has already been market-validated.

OTT adaptation rights. The web series format has opened a category that theatrical remake structures don't serve well: a 2-hour film adapted into a 6-episode limited series, which allows the story to breathe and the characters to develop. These deals are being structured at lower price points than theatrical remake rights, and the OTT platforms are hungry for locally rooted, proven-story content.

International rights brokerage. There is real money to be made connecting Indian rights holders with Asian buyers who want to adapt Indian content. This requires relationships on both sides and no production capital at all — it is a pure matchmaking and deal-structuring business. Nobody in India is doing this professionally and at scale.

South-Indian original development with remake rights retention. Make a Rs 3-4 crore Malayalam or Telugu film, retain the remake rights in your production agreement, and if the film connects, you are sitting on an asset. This is a long game, but it is how the smartest producers in this ecosystem have built genuine leverage.

Whatever your entry point into this space, the single most important thing you can do is get a qualified entertainment lawyer involved before you sign anything. The remake business rewards people who understand the legal architecture of rights ownership — and it has historically been very good at extracting value from people who don't.

Where AIO Cine Fits In

We built AIO Cine because the Indian film industry runs on relationships that are often inaccessible to talented people outside the established networks — and the remake business is one of the most relationship-dependent corners of the industry. Rights deals get done between people who know each other. Writers lose their remake royalties because no one told them they could negotiate for them. Crew members from an original production get left out of the remake entirely because the Hindi version has its own established roster.

The more connected this industry is — the more producers can find each other, the more writers know their rights, the more crew can be found for the right project — the better it functions for everyone. That is what we are building.

Register on AIO Cine, where every production house is verified before they can post crew calls, because the right opportunity should find you — whether that's a remake, a sequel, or the original that starts the whole cycle.

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