Vijay Deverakonda's Hits and Flops: Here's What Worked And What Didn't For The Liger Actor

Vijay Deverakonda's recent release Liger has met with an unprecedented failure and people have started analyzing his career already.

A Twitter handle by the name DailyCultureYT made an interesting comparison. Their Tweet pointed out that Vijay's pan-India releases starting from Dear Comrade, followed by World Famous Lover, and now Liger have all been commercially unsuccessful, and his Telugu language releases including Pelli Choopulu, Arjun Reddy, Geetha Govindham, and Taxiwaala, have commercially done well.

Whether Dear Comrade and World Famous Lover were pan-India releases is debatable, as the definition of a pan-India release is quite vague, but let's put that aside and look into the comparison.

The Tweet makes a subtle indication that maybe Vijay has not got his pan-India game right, and is missing something.

While the facts definitely indicate a clear bifurcation, this probably is not the right way to look at it, and here is why.

Although Dear Comrade, World Famous Lover, and Liger are all multi-langauge releases, they don't have much in common between them. All three projects have their own unique identities and they failed for multiple and varying reasons. And most of all, mentioning Dear Comrade alongside the other two films hurts a little, no offense.

Liger's failure was primarily due to bad writing and plastic characters. While the titular character was not so plastic, he got very little support from the rest of the characters in terms of creating a connection.

World Famous Lover was a decent film technically. However, the plot and emotional politics in the film were disturbing to many, and it was not exceptional enough to break through that barrier. Not suggesting that it was great technically, but it was probably better than Liger.

Dear Comrade failed for reasons that are not clear to me. The film was well written and well acted, and although it was not flawless, it was a pretty great film, with exceptional music. It doesn't even deserve to be discussed in this list. It deserved better.

But these three films do have something else in common, and that one thing can also be found in Arjun Reddy. A fierce and angry male lead finds it difficult to adjust to the world and its ways and struggles to have smooth relationships. While this definitely worked well in Arjun Reddy and was relatable enough in Dear Comrade, maybe it's getting a little too familiar and uninteresting to the audience.

One can never really point out why something works or doesn't work in a film, but educated guesses can always be made with some amount of logic and information. As Virginia Woolf wrote in her book A Room Of One's Own, "When a subject is controversial one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold."