This is why there are no chick-flicks in Kollywood

Chick-flicks are broadly films targeted at women, more often with a female-centric plot. The genre is pretty ill-defined. Mean girls is arguably the best example of genre as it tells the story of high school girls. 50 first dates is a rom-com. Devil wears Prada is a drama. Twilight is seen as such, since it's basically fiction about a girl who falls in love with a vampire and enters their world. The entire story is around the girl, which makes it easy for teenage girls to relate to.

As to why there are no chick-flicks in Tamil(and Telugu), I think the simple answer to this is - It is very hard for creators to specifically target female audiences and market a movie tailor-made for them.

Male audiences dominate the Tamil movie viewer demographic. Female audiences rarely make or break movies. In that list too, most movie-goers prefer existing masala movies over female-centric or female-oriented movies. I guess it makes sense for them to check in and post about a popular movie over an off-beat movie.

I think about it this way - Do I make an interesting, racy entertainer(action/rom-com) with family audiences in mind or put together a chick flick(any type you can think of) and keep my fingers crossed?

Lets split our female audiences into two broad categories - Married and single.

Married women would almost always prefer popular films - big heroes, big names, big budgets. They simply need a break from their daily grind just like men. Since they do not get to watch any number of movies, they limit their choice to the safest bet.

Single ladies would prefer the same, with additional genres like horror, English movies, rom-coms thrown into the mix. The major difference is, they can afford to watch more movies because of abundant time. But more often than not, they watch it with friends or partners, who are sure to influence their choices.

So unless you get it absolutely right - Like Mayaa, Kahani, Snehithiye - its a very hard genre to pull off in India. And even there, you can see it has been mixed with women in extra-ordinary situations to sell them better.

The ugly truth is - Male audiences couldn’t care less about female-centric movies. Given a choice between a chick-flick and literally any other genre - action, comedy, horror , they ll happily take it. Last I checked, they decided a movie’s success.

This is where creators make the huge mistake of thinking vulgar dialogues and erotic scenes will win them audiences. In the name of chick-flicks, which are supposed to be movies that are told from a female POV - love, ambition, betrayal, societal constraints and such, these upma movies focus only on sex. These are unrealistic films that try to take what boys think about female sexuality and basically make their characters say it out loud. This is not even remotely going to work. 90ml is a classic example. The film was supposed to be female-centric but was marketed at soup boys. Meh!

Movies like 27 dresses, the Notebook, 50 first dates, Devil wears Prada, PS: I love you also come backed with strong performances and scripts. These are movies that folks would watch on Netflix or TV. I don’t know if even women/young couples will pay big money to watch them in theatres if made in Tamil. The FDFS crowd will happily give it a miss.

I supposed that is a good reason this genre is almost non-existent in Tamil.