Hansal Mehta Predicts Medium Of OTT Will Have The Same Journey As Television

Filmmaker Hansal Mehta, who is enjoying the response to the recently released second season of his ‘Scam’ series - ‘Scam 2003: The Telgi Story’, feels that the medium of OTT too will go down the path of redundancy just like its predecessor television.

Hansal has returned with the ‘Scam’ series after almost 3 years. The first season of the show, which starred Pratik Gandhi in the titular role of stock market scamster Harshad Mehta, was released in 2020 and registered a breakout success.

Hansal, who serves as the creative director on ‘Scam 2003: The Telgi Story’ this time, told IANS: “It is the nature of capitalism and market forces that if something succeeds, that success has to be replicated in order to make more money out of it.

“People repeat it and make it a formula until it fails then, they have to do something new. This is not only limited to films as a business, it's there everywhere and that’s because of the market forces.”

The ‘Aligarh’ director then quoted an example as he said: “If a personal computer at a certain price point is doing very well in the market then 20 other manufacturers of personal computers will try selling their machines at different price points.”

He further mentioned: “The only thing that I find different in our Industries that it's very volatile, you can never gauge or predict what the audience will like or the consumer behaviour in this case will be. What they embrace today they might not embrace tomorrow but is the high probability that they would embrace it later.”

He then mentioned the monumental success of ‘Gadar 2’ as an example as he told IANS: “And this is proved by the success of ‘Gadar 2’. If ‘Gadar 2’ came out in the late 2000s or in the early 2010s, I feel it would not have registered the kind of success that it has seen now. But because the film cultivated a legacy of over 20 years, people wanted to watch that film in the theatres when it was released.”

‘Scam 2003: The Telgi Story’ is streaming on Sony LIV.