I don't know how things work in the film industry. But looking at the present Koratala Shiva-Rajesh Manduri conflict about the "Acharya" story plagiarising allegations, I feel like writing this.
Rajesh is asking Koratala to narrate his story to know how far it is coinciding with that of his. Koratala on the other hand, rightly responded asking if he has to narrate the story to tens of people who come with similar allegations tomorrow.
Both are sounding reasonable in their respective perspectives.
But what happens if the story is leaked or if it is discussed in the public domain before the film's release?
As far as I observed, the cinema is not about "what", but about "how". We have umpteen number of films on Ramayana and Mahabharata from 1930s to 1990s and all those stories were open books. We have many remake films from neighboring languages that proved to be superhits and blockbusters, where the stories were obviously open for all.
Chiranjeevi himself has done Tagore, the remake of Tamil film Ramana and Shankardada MBBS, the remake of the very well known Munnabhai MBBS from Hindi. What happened if the stories were leaked before the release?
Rajesh Manduri says that his story becomes stale if the line is used by someone else. But I think he is wrong. Even in Telugu, many films were remade again and again with similar concepts. The line in NTR's film "Vaddante Dabbu" was used again for Balakrishna's "Babai Abbai''. Rajnikanth's super hit film "Arunachalam" was also made with the same line.
Recently it was leaked about Ala Vaikunthapuramulo before its release that it was inspired from NTR's "Intiguttu". I watched that film out of curiosity. That didn't kill my enthusiasm to watch Ala Vaikunthapuramulo. I found some similarities but I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Same was the case with "A Aa" that was inspired from the old film "Meena".
I don't understand what fear stops the writers/directors in letting the story open before its release.
Rajani Surapaneni, Vijayawada
