Negative Impact of Gautham and Vijay's Yohan Adhyayam Ondru 

Gautham Menon decided to drop his much touted project, Yohan Adhyayam Ondru, with Vijay through a 140-character tweet message yesterday. Just like how love break-ups over an SMS is considered to be rude, Gautham Menon's action of dropping the most expected movie of 2013 in such frivolous manner proves that he is no more mature than a teenage kid. 

When such a big project goes down the drain, it also brings down a lot of other things as well. Some of them may be of monetary value. However, most of the negative impacts are intangibles in the form of brand value, goodwill, and other un-quantifiables. 

Gautham owes an apology to fans

Yohan has been one of the much buzzed about project ever since the first look posters were released in July 2011. The tremendous amount of investments made by fans in terms of time, effort, emotional commitments is truly staggering. Every single Vijay fan out there must have invested more of his personal time for Yohan than Gautham himself for developing the script. At a minimum, doesn't Gautham feel that he owes an apology to the fans who had invested their time and putting their personal-ego on the line while supporting their favourite Ilayathalapathy and now the defunct Yohan project. 

Gautham fails in his Fiduciary Duty

As a Chief Creative Officer of publicly traded Photon Kathas, this is highly irresponsible to announce the cancellation of a $10Million project on a twitter message. Let's say for example, if Apple announces a cancellation of iPhone 5 casually, will the wall street investors spare the executive management team? The CEO will be fired by board of directors immediately. Since Photon Kathas is hardly $6Million market cap (Rs. 30 Crores), you wouldn't see the same level of reaction from the market. However, it may be time for AR Rahman, who is listed as one of the creative advisors of Photon Kathas with <1% minority ownership, to consider severing ties since much of the investments by public is probably based on AR Rahman's endorsement (just like fans wouldn't like AR Rahman's name to be associated with EMU farms)

Negative Impact on inflow of investments to Tamil Industry

This sets a bad example for the entire Tamil industry as multi-national production companies like 20th Century Fox, Dreamworks, etc and also bollywood big producers such as Eros or Yash Raj Films will now hesitate to invest money in upcoming Tamil directors due to abysmal level of professionalism. These types of negative press coverage about a much touted $10 Million dropped projects bring down the credibility of the entire industry; it is not just an individual decision made by a director in vacuum.

Conclusion

At multiple levels, what has happened with Yohan is unfortunate for fans and Tamil movie industry in general. What is appalling is the lack of accountability and moral irresponsibility to keep up the commitment made to the fans. At this rate, Gautham's brand/credibility balance may soon be bankrupt unless Neethane En Ponvasantham manage to top-up some credits.