Ramya: Star-driven box office hits are about machoism and not evolving the mindset of the movie-goer

Kannada actress and producer Ramya says that filmmakers are still stuck on presenting stories of machoism and not tales about or for women

Ramya laments the lack of good roles for women

Actress Ramya, who was the queen bee of Kannada cinema, when she decided to halt her film career and plunge into active politics, has often been asked if she’d consider returning to movies. When she then began to actively look for something that she could make a comeback with, Ramya was disappointed with what she came across. The actress, who’d told OTTPlay that she does not fancy doing the kind of roles she was doing 10-15 years ago and that she needed to evolve with time and age, yet again lamented that what’s being written for women in cinema is largely still what she used to do 2 decades ago.

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Ramya was speaking at the Deccan Herald 2040 summit, when she was asked about the future of Kannada cinema in the next 15 years. The actress noted how in the first two months of 2025, there had been close to 50 film releases, of which, only 1 managed to get some returns, while the rest tanked without a trace. Even in 2024, she added, the hits were only a handful and star vehicles. While box office success is good for the industry, she reckons that star-driven narratives are all about machoism, which, from story-telling perspective is “quite sad”.

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“I don’t think it’s doing much in terms of evolving the mindset of the movie-goer, because you are only giving them one narrative of machoism. There is no one really telling stories of women. For instance, when I decided to do films again, I heard a lot of scripts and thought that they were still stuck in time and were exactly what I used to do 20 years ago. There’s nothing new and I asked someone why this was the case and they said that when I, or say Malashree was there, the producers used to ask directors or writers to write scripts keeping the heroine in mind, because he knew there was some value add and potential revenue from having us. Right now, there is no such probability,” she said.

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Eventually, it boils down to money, adds Ramya. The actress says that when someone is investing money on a film and people are not watching it, whereby the producer ends up losing his/her investment, it makes one wonder what the point of it is. Ramya adds that its time the industry introspects and learns from its mistakes. She cited the example of the Malayalam industry, which, in the last decade or 2 has changed to focus on story-driven narratives, rather than heroism or machoism. “The stories are about the people; it’s not even gender based, it's very inclusive," she says.

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