Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap has hit out at Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos over the latter’s recent comments stating that perhaps it was not ideal for the streaming giant to start in the Indian market with the show Sacred Games (2018-19)
The acclaimed series, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Saif Ali Khan, was created by Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap and was Netflix’s maiden show in India.
In a podcast with Nikhil Kamath, Ted said that the Indian market is difficult to track as the consumers are inherently suspicious of subscription. He also said that starting out with Sacred Games might have painted the streaming service as too high brow for the Indian consumer.
Asked about India as a market, and the reality that Netflix doesn’t have a significant share of it yet, Ted said, “It took us a couple of years to get the product-market fit right. Our very first Indian original show was Sacred Games. And I thought, ‘This is going to be great. People in India love movies. This is a TV show that feels as big as a movie, it has movie stars.’ What’s interesting about it is that it was very, very novel, but what I didn’t understand that we were introducing a brand new kind of entertainment in a country the size of India.”
He added, “For me, if I did it all over again, would I have done Sacred Games a couple of years later, and did things that were more populist (instead)? Maybe. But we knew that India was going to be a slower journey to get to where we wanted to get to. But it’s a great prize, at the end of the day. The addressable market is growing in the next couple of years in India, so it’s exciting.”
Anurag shared a picture of the published interview and called Ted the “definition of dumb” in the caption. “He should have started with Saas Bahu .. he would have done well. Which he is doing now Z I always knew the tech guys are dumb when it comes to story telling but @tedsarandos is the definition of dumb is what I didn’t know . Good to discover that. This explains everything now.”
It is to be noted that Netflix recently partnered with Ektaa R Kapoor, who attained popularity with her brand of saas-bahu daily soaps.
Anurag has slammed Netflix in the past too. When the TV series Adolescence was gaining popularity in the country, the director has said that the streamer’s Indian arm wouldn’t greenlight a show like that. “Netflix India is a totally opposite sh**show. If they were pitched this, most probably they would have rejected it or turned it into a 90 minute film (that too seems like an impossibility because it doesn’t have an ending that is black and white),” he had written on Instagram.
