Drishyam 3: Can Ajay Devgn’s Franchise Survive Without Its Own Story?

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

As Drishyam 3 heads toward its October 2 release with a new cast pairing of Ajay Devgn and Jaideep Ahlawat, the franchise faces a question bigger than box office numbers — how much longer can it lean on borrowed plots before audiences start asking for something original.

Ajay Devgn is heading back to Goa, and so is Georgekutty.

Drishyam 3 is set for release on October 2, and the film’s trailer tour has already put the franchise back in conversation — not just for what’s new on screen, but for who isn’t there anymore. Akshaye Khanna, who played the quietly menacing IG Meera Deshmukh’s husband-adjacent antagonist across the last two Hindi instalments, has been replaced by Jaideep Ahlawat. It’s the kind of casting swap that tends to generate more chatter than any plot detail, largely because Ahlawat carries a very different screen presence — colder, more procedural, less theatrical — than what Khanna brought to the role.

That shift matters more than it might first appear. The Drishyam series, in both its Malayalam original and Hindi adaptation, has always worked as a cat-and-mouse duel between a resourceful, ordinary family man and a relentless investigator closing in on the truth. Change the investigator, and you change the temperature of the entire film. Ahlawat, an actor known for restraint rather than volatility, could push the franchise into quieter, more psychologically tense territory than the Hindi version has attempted before.

A Franchise Built on Someone Else’s Blueprint

It’s worth being direct about something the marketing around Drishyam tends to soften: this is not an original Hindi story. The franchise is a remake of the Malayalam Drishyam, written and directed by Jeethu Joseph, which itself spawned adaptations across multiple Indian languages before Bollywood’s version arrived. Ajay Devgn’s Drishyam and Drishyam 2 followed the Malayalam films’ structure closely enough that much of the tension for Hindi audiences came from performance and craft rather than narrative surprise.

That’s not necessarily a weakness. Remakes have long been part of Indian commercial cinema, and a well-executed one can introduce a story to an entirely new audience who never encountered the original. But it does raise a fair question heading into a third instalment: is Drishyam 3 continuing Jeethu Joseph’s narrative universe, or is it now improvising within a框架 that has run out of source material to borrow from? If the Hindi version is moving into territory the Malayalam original hasn’t yet covered, that’s a meaningfully different creative proposition — one that asks Devgn and his writers to sustain suspense on their own terms rather than repackage a story that already proved itself elsewhere.

What the Genre Promises

Drishyam’s appeal has never really been about shock value. It’s a slow-burn procedural built around a family protecting itself through intelligence rather than violence, and its emotional anchor is Georgekutty — an ordinary man whose devotion to his wife and daughters becomes indistinguishable from his cunning. Audiences return to this franchise for the satisfaction of watching a plan unfold in hindsight, not for spectacle.

That creates a specific expectation problem for a third film. The twist of the first film was the twist. The tension of the second was in watching the investigation reopen. A third instalment has to find a genuinely new angle of pressure on the same family, without repeating the beats that made the first two work, and without feeling like the franchise is manufacturing jeopardy simply because the box office asked for a sequel.

Reading the Casting Change

There’s a temptation to read the Khanna-to-Ahlawat swap purely as scheduling or contractual matter — these things often are, and no evidence here suggests otherwise. But from a storytelling standpoint, it’s also an opportunity. Ahlawat has built a career on internalised menace — think of his work in the kind of role where stillness reads as more dangerous than shouting. If Drishyam 3 leans into that quality rather than trying to replicate Khanna’s energy, the film could carve out its own identity within a franchise otherwise defined by repetition.

For audiences, the reaction will likely split along familiar lines. Viewers who came to the franchise for Devgn’s quiet-family-man persona and the puzzle-box plotting will judge the film on whether the mystery still surprises them. Those more invested in performance than plot may find the recalibrated antagonist dynamic the most interesting part of the release, regardless of how familiar the underlying story beats feel.

Studio Perspective

The real tension around Drishyam 3 isn’t Akshaye Khanna’s absence or even the release date. It’s whether a franchise built almost entirely on adaptation can keep generating goodwill once it exhausts the story it was adapting. Two films in, Drishyam succeeded because Jeethu Joseph had already solved the hardest part — the plotting — and Devgn’s version simply needed to translate that structure with conviction, which it did well.

A third film changes the equation. If Drishyam 3 is drawing from further chapters of the original Malayalam universe, the Hindi version inherits a tested story once again, and the casting change becomes the most significant creative variable. If instead the writers are extending the narrative independently, the film is making a much riskier bet — asking audiences to trust original plotting from a team whose reputation was built on adapting someone else’s.

Either way, the franchise’s durability now depends less on shock twists and more on whether it can keep the emotional core — a family’s quiet desperation to protect itself — feeling fresh rather than procedural. That’s a harder task than any casting change, and it’s the one the trailer tour in Goa won’t answer. Only the film itself can.

— Studio CarryOnHarry Editorial Desk

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