Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. News

Netflix extends its international reach with upcoming series from India

Christine Persaud
By

netflix india sacred games vikram chandra2 feature
Vikram Chandra, Author of 'Sacred Games' Image used with permission by copyright holder
Netflix has been increasing its international presence by picking up a number of original series from countries around the world, including Suburra from Italy, 3% from Brazil, and, from Spain, a yet-to-be-named period piece from the director and producers of Velvet and Gran Hotel. The latest, Sacred Games, hails from India.

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Indian author Vikram Chandra, the series will be set in Mumbai (and indeed, filmed on location in India), and follows organized crime, corruption, politics, and espionage within the economy. “It is an epic masterwork of exceptional richness and power that interweaves the lives of the privileged, the famous, the wretched, and the bloodthirsty,” says Netflix.

Recommended Videos

Produced in Hindi-English in partnership with Phantom Films, the series, once complete, will be available to Netflix subscribers globally. There’s no confirmed release date yet.

Related

Chandra, who will be involved in the project, says he is “confident that all the color and vitality and music of the fictional world I’ve lived with for so long will come fully alive on the large-scale canvas provided by Netflix. I’m thrilled to be working with Netflix and Phantom Films.”

While no casting details were confirmed, Erik Barmack, vice president of international original series at Netflix, says the television adaptation of the novel will feature the “best Indian and global film talent available today.”

Created by four young men — Vikas Bahl, Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane and Madhu Mantena — Phantom Films was formed in 2011. The company has 10 releases to its credit to date, including Masaan, which won the Fipresci Award in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last year. Udta Punjab, its latest film, will be released worldwide later this month. Additionally, Phantom will be producing a number of horror films for worldwide release through a partnership with Blumhouse Productions and Ivanhoe Pictures.

Published in 2006, Sacred Games  — the novel — received positive reviews, but didn’t quite sell as well as hoped, reportedly losing more than half of its original advance. Part of the reason could have been its massive size: the book was over 900 pages long. Hopefully Netflix’s on-screen version will generate more positive results with viewers.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Christine Persaud
Christine Persaud
Contributor
Christine has decades of experience in trade and consumer journalism. While she started her career writing exclusively about…
Netflix’s Castlevania series should be your next dark-fantasy fix
Collage of the main cast of Castlevania season 3 on Netflix.

While the infamous "video game curse" is still prevalent today in modern-day adaptations, Netflix's Castlevania animated series was arguably the first to break that pattern. It originally premiered in 2017 with a brief, four-episode-long first season, but the impact that it had seemed to finally tap into the potential of video game series adapted for TV and/or film.

The jury is still out on whether live-action productions could do justice to their source material -- though, perhaps HBO's The Last of Us could produce that first major shift -- but the animation medium looks to have unlocked something. With fantasy cemented as a pop culture staple thanks to the likes of House of the Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Castlevania is an excellent animated dark-fantasy series to binge. From its stylish anime inspiration to its stunningly animated set pieces, it chases that genre high.
The perfect blend of Western style with Japanese anime

Read more
Treason trailer features Charlie Cox in Netflix’s MI6 series
Charlie Cox stands against the wall in a scene from Treason.

Netflix has released the first trailer for Treason, an espionage thriller set in the world of MI6. The limited series features Charlie Cox as Adam Lawrence, a British intelligence officer thrust into command after a failed assassination attempt against the chief of MI6.

Treason | Official Trailer | Netflix

Read more
With Stranger Things and Squid Game, Netflix proves it’s better at making great TV shows than movies
Eleven, Will, Mike, and Jonathan standing and staring in a still from Stranger Things Season 4.

Netflix received a whopping 105 nominations at this year's Emmys, driven by hits like Squid Game, Stranger Things, and Ozark. While it's a decline from last year's 129, Netflix still secured the second-most nominations out of any network or streamer, with only HBO beating it thanks to juggernauts like Succession and The White Lotus.

Still, not everything is great for the so-called King of the Streamers. Whether it's canceling shows left and right or losing subscribers every quarter, the original streamer can't seem to catch a break, and not even its lush and over-the-top original movies can help. Netflix premiered the tiresome The Gray Man less than a month ago, and the film -- which reportedly sports a $200 million production tag -- has already left the pop culture vocabulary; not even the news that a sequel and a prequel are coming was enough to stimulate interest.

Read more