Prasanth Pandiyaraj's Warrant trailer out; Vilangu 2 confirmed

Director Pandiraj used his time on stage at Saturday’s Warrant trailer launch to roast first-time lead Prasanth Pandiyaraj at length, the event ZEE5 had set up to push the show’s May 22 premiere. The bigger news of the evening came from Tamil ZEE5 series head Sham, who confirmed Vilangu 2 is in active development and reframed Warrant as a backstory expansion built around a police character who will appear in that second season.

ZEE5 first teased Warrant earlier this month with the show’s key art and a half-minute drop that ran on the Vilangu connection. Sham filled in the timeline on stage. Vilangu, the streamer’s 2022 rural-noir police drama, started as a short, contained series but kept revealing more of itself as the writing room dug in. By 2023, ZEE5 was already developing Warrant as a connected story rather than a sequel, and the team has committed to one quality Tamil series a month as the broader cadence the streamer wants to settle into. The pitch for Warrant: how an ordinary man becomes a hardened police officer. The character carrying that arc, N. Kottai Karuppasamy, will turn up in Vilangu 2 with his backstory now already on screen by the time the second season lands.

The roast itself unfolded once Pandiraj took the mic. He opened by working the room around Prasanth’s appetite for being teased. However much you rib him, he enjoys it; if you scold him, he loves it more, was the framing. He then ran the trajectory the lead has been on. After Maaman, Pandiraj said, Prasanth came to him with the news that he wanted to do a web series and act in it, then volunteered the script: an action story he wanted to lead. The punchline landed on Prasanth’s self-belief. In five years, Pandiraj predicted, his protégé would be standing for MLA, that is how confident the man is in himself. On the directing side, Pandiraj added that Vignesh Natarajan, who helmed Warrant in his first solo project, had earlier worked with him on Kadhakali, and called the trailer cut beautifully made.

Pandiraj’s full address at the launch, where the Prasanth roast lands with the room.

Vignesh Natarajan, taking the mic next, traced his way into the project through the small handful of people who had ever believed he would make a film at all. His parents and Prasanth, he said, were that handful. He thanked the writing partnership with Prasanth, the assist he had received from Pandiraj as guru, and the persistence it took to convince Prasanth to sit on the lead chair instead of the director’s. Through the shoot, Vignesh said, Prasanth had operated like a co-director rather than a star, staying in the room as a peer for the rest of the crew.

Prasanth’s own response struck a softer note than Pandiraj’s stage business had set up. He framed Warrant as a Vilangu-shaped second wind, this time with him in front of the camera, and said he had been at a quiet point professionally when Vilangu happened in 2022, after his Bruce Lee directorial in 2017 and before Maaman in 2025 reset the volume. The audience reception to Vilangu, he said, gave him the identity that has carried into everything since. He thanked his family, his crew and his collaborators, and addressed Vignesh directly: the series had been a genuine co-write, and the only reason he was on screen at all was that Vignesh had insisted.

Among the actresses on the panel, the affection was constant. Kausalya described the set as a no-pressure, family-feeling shoot, and added with a half-laugh that even as a cast member she still does not know the full plot, the suspense being what makes her wait for the premiere as much as any audience member will. Meena, on her third ZEE5 project, plays a nurse character named Sharmi and praised the staging. Sayadevi said she had refused the role outright at first, then folded the moment Prasanth deployed the I-am-the-lead-will-you-not-back-me line on her; on stage she said he genuinely shines as a hero in the final cut, and signed off with a comic instruction to the audience to take their feedback, good or bad, directly to Prasanth. Poornima Ravi went the most meta of the evening: there is no such thing as hero material, she said; whoever drives the story is the hero, and Prasanth has that ability on screen as well as off it.

Kavin worked the same trailer-as-feature angle from the actor side. Prasanth had shown him the cut in private, he said, and his first reaction was that the material played like a film and Prasanth should be acting in films at this register. Prasanth’s rebuttal, per Kavin, was that the web-series form was deliberate, picked to give his assistant directors room to grow into their own first projects. On the producers’ bench, Madan from Sivan Pictures, who has put out Vilangu, Game and a Sony series before Warrant, said making a series is harder than making a film, that only love of the form keeps him on the fourth one, and that better budgets from streamers are how Tamil OTT will hold its standard. Sineesh joked from the same bench that Prasanth has by now collected an advance from every Tamil producer in the room. Kumar, who said he had just read the full script and was now actively asking Prasanth to find him a film among the four he is reportedly committed to direct next, called the writing the strongest pitch of the evening.

The supporting cast lined up by the makers includes Balaji Sakthivel, Kali Venkat, Aruldoss, Namritha MV, Aruljothi, Sayadevi, Hello Kandasamy, Meena, Kausalya and Vaiyapuri. Aruldoss and Bose Venkat both used their stage time to push the same line about the show: a police story is rarely told this close to its lockup-room realities, and Warrant takes a constable through psychological terrain Tamil cinema usually skirts. Director Ramkumar, who came up to back the actor turn, said he had nearly cast Prasanth in his Parking film and predicted Warrant would land; director Tamizharasan Pachaimuthu offered the praise-line for Vilangu’s detailing that the team is now under pressure to clear here.

The plot, in shape: a constable named N. Kottai Karuppasamy starts on the regular village-station beat and walks into a series of old-warrant cases that begin to bend his behaviour. A lockup-death incident is the inflection. From there the show becomes a study in moral drift and the dark side of uniform power, with truth, lies, authority and justice colliding in a rural police-procedural register that draws on real-incident influences. The setting is rural police stations, local political pressure, and the kind of stories the team is signalling could fold into multiple future seasons.

The official Warrant trailer, launched on Saturday May 9.

Director Suseenthiran came up to back the project on long-standing personal ties with both Pandiraj and Prasanth, citing Vilangu’s polish and Maaman’s craft as the reasons he had wanted to see Prasanth on the actor’s side of the camera. The pitch from Suseenthiran’s seat was simple: this team has earned the lane and Warrant should land on it.

Sam CS scores. Ashok Kumar shoots, R Ramar edits. The production runs out of Sivan Pictures and S Studios with Prasanth Pandiyaraj himself in the producer credit alongside P Vishal and PM Atheeswar. AIM handles event and PR. Warrant lands on Tamil ZEE5 on May 22.