Tamil producers' strike widens as TFAPA backs revenue-share push

TFAPA has joined the May 2 strike and accused leading actors of handing their dates to other-language producers when Tamil films flop. 30 to 40 shoots paused, 7,000 FEFSI workers idle.

The Tamil Film Producers Council’s 24-hour token strike picked up a second producers’ body on the morning of May 2. The Tamil Film Active Producers Association (TFAPA), led by president T G Thyagarajan with general secretary T Siva and treasurer G Dhananjeyan, issued its own letter of support and confirmed that none of its members would shoot or do post-production work today. The body went a step further than the TFPC and put a long-running grievance in writing: when a Tamil film flops, the council says, leading actors and technicians do not stand by the producer who funded them. They give their next dates to producers from other languages, and the Tamil producer who took the loss is left with no path back to a second film.

The original strike call, signed by TFPC secretaries S Kathiresan and R Radhakrishnan after the body’s general body meeting on April 26, has paused 30 to 40 daily shoots and stood down roughly 7,000 FEFSI workers. The single demand on the table is structural: actors in medium and big-budget Tamil films must move to a revenue-sharing model, where star fees flex with how the film performs and the lead actor signs on to a second film with the same producer if the first one loses money.

“For the past three years, we have reached out to Nadigar Sangam in person, through letters, and via the press, insisting that this situation must change and that actors need to share in the producers’ profits and losses. To this day, they have taken absolutely no action.”

TFAPA’s pitch: this is how Bollywood and Telugu already work

The TFAPA letter sets out the comparison the Tamil producers have been making in private rooms for years. In Hindi cinema, revenue sharing has been the working model for the top tier for the last 15 years — Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn all run on it. Top Telugu stars, the body writes, follow the same arrangement. The result, as TFAPA frames it, is that when a film tanks in those industries, the loss is not concentrated on one producer’s books, and the producer is in a position to keep making films.

The accusation against the Tamil A-list is then put plainly. “If a producer makes a film and incurs a loss, no leading actor or technician steps forward to save them. Instead, they give their dates to producers of other languages, completely ignoring Tamil cinema producers.” That sentence, signed by the three office bearers and copied to the TFPC, is the part of the May 2 paperwork that producers across the industry will be reading first.

What’s on hold today

Studio floors across Chennai and EVP Film City are dark. Post-production houses have downed work. The TFAPA letter goes out of its way to thank “all the associations involved in Tamil film production, FEFSI and all its affiliated unions” for cooperating with the token shutdown. The framing on both letters is the same: the industry is willingly losing a day of output now to make a structural point, and the cost of doing nothing is much larger.

The Nadigar Sangam has so far described the strike as sudden and the producers’ process as inadequate. With a second producers’ body now on the same page and an indefinite-strike threat already on the table, the next round of talks is the one that decides whether the May 2 letter stays a one-day signal or becomes the front end of a longer shutdown.