Anurag Kashyap says OTT in India is ‘past its golden time’: ‘OTT is starting to turn into TV, dictated by algorithm’

Anurag Kashyap, who was the co-creator of Sacred Games, which was Netflix’s first original in India, said that OTT platforms are only willing to experiment until the time they need new subscribers but after they reach a threshold, they also start rehashing the same formula. “Until the time they need new subscribers, they will experiment with new things. When they have exhausted that, then it turns into TV. This is a cycle. I have been around for 32 years now,” he said.

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Anurag then brought up the rise of multiplex culture and said that as multiplexes started gaining prominence in the late 2000s, a new wave of filmmaking started in India with films like Dev D and Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, but now that idea does not exist anymore. “Now the same multiplexes will play the same film on four screens. They are not supporting the films they were initially doing. When the studios came in, they were also making new kind of films, but then they also started catering to the same formula,” he said.

The filmmaker recalled doing Sacred Games with Vikramaditya Motwane and said that they wouldn’t find the same kind of support anymore. “Me and Vikram made the first Netflix India show and that kind of a sensibility and support, we will not get anymore. Because that sensibility has changed. People who have no experience in filmmaking are now running the department of shows. And they have come from television. So their sensibility is television. Any creative person will tell you that when you are dealing with them, sometimes it’s like hitting your head against a wall,” he said.

Anurag Kashyap then expressed that he doesn’t see himself making another show for an OTT platform and brought up his show Maximum City, which was shelved by Netflix, after the Tandav debacle. “I don’t think that the kind of long format I want to make, I will get to make it. And they are also scared. Maximum City is one of the examples. An approved green lit show, that got dropped with no official communication. They only want to do what their algorithm dictates,” he said.