HC bars OTT release of Arvind Swamy’s Rendagam

CHENNAI: Justice C Saravanan of the Madras High Court on Wednesday passed a direction to the producers of the Arvind Swamy-starrer Rendagam not to release the motion picture on the OTT platforms in India.

The judge passed the direction on hearing a suit filed by one Kishore Kumar of Valasaravakkam in the city. The petitioner sought for a direction to restrain the makers of Rendagam from releasing the movie on OTT on October 6.

According to the petitioner, he had written a screenplay for a yet-to-be-produced movie under the title Jawa and emailed the same to actor Arvind Swamy in 2018.

While Kishore was expecting that he would get an opportunity to direct the movie Jawa and Arvind Swamy would play the protagonist in it, to his shock, a movie named Rendagam in Tamil and Ottu in Malayalam were released on the same plot as his Jawa screenplay.

The plaintiff further claimed that he had registered his story with the South Indian Film Writers Association on November 19, 2018.

Recording the submissions, the judge passed an interim stay to release Rendagam and Ottu. The court further directed the respondents to deposit Rs 10 lakh each to the credit of the suit within October 10. The case was posted for October 10.