Top directors of Tamil cinema including Mani Ratnam, Shankar, Gautham Vasudev Menon, AR Murugadoss, Mysskin, Vetrimaaran, Lingusamy, Sasi, Vasanta Balan, Balaji Sakthivel, and Lokesh Kanagaraj have jointly launched a new production house. The company has been named Rain On Films Pvt Ltd and its first production will be directed by founder-member Lokesh Kanagaraj.
According to reports, the production house will produce content for a variety of platforms including big screens and Over-the-Top releases. The company will function as a corporate entity and has even been registered under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in September 2020, reports state. According to sources, director Vetrimaaran’s office will become the new headquarters for Rain on Films.
According to a DT Next report which quotes a source, Lokesh Kanagaraj’s next project after Vikram will be the first project produced by the film house. The cast and crew of the project have not been finalised as yet.
Apart from films, the production house will also take new ideas from young and offbeat filmmakers to create anthologies, series and shows for content platforms including Amazon Prime Video, Disney+Hotstar and Netflix.
Director Mani Ratnam's earlier outing as producer was Navarasa, a nine episode anthology which released on Netflix in August 2021. Each episode of Navarasa was based on one of the nine emotions. Mani Ratnam’s production house Madras Talkies collaborated with Jayendra Panchapakesan’s Qube Cinema Technologies to produce Navarasa. The series has several stars as part of its cast including Prakash Raj, Revathi, Vijay Sethupathi, Parvathy, Siddharth, Suriya, Arvind Swami, Delhi Ganesh, Prasanna etc.
The episodes were also directed by big names including Gautham Menon, Priyadarshan, Bejoy Nambiar, Karthik Subbaraj, Vasanth etc. The music for Navarasa was also composed by AR Rahman, Santhosh Narayanan, Govind Vasantha, Vishal Bharadwaj and so on.
Meanwhile Mani Ratnam is wrapping up his magnum opus Ponniyin Selvan while director Shankar is about to begin shooting a new project with Telugu star Ram Charan.