3 min readHyderabadMar 13, 2026 04:31 PM IST
When Made in Korea was released on Netflix this Thursday, it became the first Indo-Korean film to reach a mainstream audience. It is a modest production, a feel-good story about a Tamil girl navigating heartbreak in Seoul. But its arrival brought an older, bigger story back to the surface. One that involved a much more prominent cast, a legendary director, and a collaboration between two of Asia’s largest film industries that briefly looked possible and then simply did not happen.
In January 2019, Tamil cinema’s most anticipated production was Indian 2, the sequel to Shankar’s 1996 blockbuster Indian, with Kamal Haasan reprising his role as Senapathy. The film had been announced in September 2017 and was finally set to go on floors on January 18, 2019. Around the same time, reports began circulating that Shankar was in talks with South Korean actress and singer Bae Suzy for a key role in the movie.
For those unfamiliar with Suzy, her potential casting was not a novelty. She had built a serious body of work, rising to recognition with Architecture 101, returning to television with Vagabond, and establishing herself as a solo artiste after her time as a member of K-pop group Miss A. Bringing her into a Shankar production alongside Kamal Haasan would have been a genuine cultural moment across both industries.
The timing made sense as well. Shankar and cinematographer Ravi Varman were location scouting in Taiwan, where key portions of the film were to be shot, and casting an internationally recognised Korean actress in those sequences would have given Indian 2 a pan-Asian identity that few Indian films had attempted at that scale.
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The buzz spread quickly. K-pop fans in India and Tamil cinema fans received the news with visible excitement. Fan accounts dedicated to both Bae Suzy and Kamal Haasan treated the reports as near-confirmed.
For a brief window, it felt like two of Asia’s most distinct entertainment cultures were going to come together in a meaningful way. However, as months passed by, the casting quietly disappeared from the conversation, and within weeks, Indian 2 had far more serious problems to deal with.
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What followed was one of the most difficult production histories in recent Tamil cinema. Principal photography began on January 18, 2019, but proceeded in fits and starts over the next five years. In February 2020, a crane accident on set killed three crew members and left ten others injured. Kamal Haasan, Shankar and Kajal Aggarwal were among those who narrowly escaped. A few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic halted the production entirely for close to two years. Budget disputes between Shankar and Lyca Productions added further delays, and Ravi Varman eventually left the project to work on Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan.
By the time Indian 2 finally released in July 2024, the Bae Suzy chapter had long been forgotten. The film itself did not help matters, opening to poor reviews and falling short of the expectations five years of waiting had created.
