Following the runaway international success of “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies,” Thailand’s GDH 559 producer Vanridee Pongsittisak is keeping busy — with a dog at the center of her next film, and the remake of a beloved Adam Sandler romantic comedy waiting in the wings.
Pongsittisak is producing a Thai-language adaptation of “50 First Dates,” the 2004 Hollywood romcom starring Sandler and Drew Barrymore, as a co-production between GDH 559 and Sony Pictures Intl. Prods. This marks a notable departure for a producer who has long resisted remakes, but she says the original was simply too personal to pass up.
“In the past, I was never really interested in doing remakes,” she tells Variety. “But ’50 First Dates’ was an exception, partly because the original film is something I genuinely love.”
Two factors, she explains, made her comfortable approaching the material. The first was the passage of time: with roughly two decades since the original’s release, she felt there was meaningful room to rethink the film through a contemporary Thai cultural lens. The second was the durability of its central idea. In her reading, the film’s emotional core is about learning to live in the present — a theme she believes resonates even more strongly today than when the film first came out. Her goal, she says, is not to replicate the original scene by scene but to find the emotional truth within it and make it feel genuinely Thai.
That instinct — to find the universal inside the deeply local — has become a signature of Pongsittisak’s work at GDH, where original IP is central to the company’s identity. “The WHAT should be ours, but the HOW should be world-class,” she says, summarizing the studio’s philosophy. “We tell our own stories, but we present them with filmmaking craft that meets an international standard.”
That approach paid off handsomely with “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies,” the 2024 Thai drama that traveled far beyond its home market. Pongsittisak attributes the film’s cross-cultural reach to its grounding in a universal subject — the generational gap within modern families — told through two characters with the greatest distance between them: a grandson and his grandmother. “That shared emotional experience — of family, distance, and reconnection — is something audiences around the world can recognize in their own lives,” she says.
The success of “Grandma” has already begun reshaping GDH’s place in the international marketplace. Pongsittisak notes that international studios, including those from Hollywood, China, India and Korea — markets that have long engaged Thailand primarily for production services — are now approaching GDH with co-production opportunities centered on stories with strong local roots but global potential. “That comes from trust in our storytelling,” she says, “our ability to take those universal emotions and make them connect across different cultures.”
The immediate next project, however, is “Gohan,” a film that Pongsittisak describes as intimate and emotionally honest in the same spirit as “Grandma.” The story centers on the relationship between humans and animals — specifically dogs — a theme GDH had explored in earlier, unrealized iterations. “It wasn’t until this version of ‘Gohan’ that everything finally came together in the right way,” she says.
Industry attention around “Gohan” has already been substantial. The film secured distribution across Southeast Asia, parts of East Asia and the Benelux region ahead of its promo reel screening at EFM in Berlin earlier this year, where it also closed deals for Latin America and Scandinavia. A private full-film buyers’ screening at Hong Kong FilMart has sold out, with strong interest also being reported from Eastern Europe, Australia and New Zealand, India, North America and Spain. The film is set for its gala premiere in Thailand on March 30, ahead of a countrywide theatrical release on April 2.
Pongsittisak credits the “Grandma” experience with reinforcing her belief in the power of modest, personal stories. The film was developed during the pandemic, when even the possibility of production was uncertain. She says that uncertainty was, paradoxically, liberating. “We just focused on telling the story as honestly as we could,” she recalls. “And somehow, that very personal approach allowed the film to travel farther than anything we had done before.”
Looking ahead, she says GDH’s ambitions are not defined by scale for its own sake, but by continued creative growth. “We’re not making films with the mindset of chasing success all the time,” she says. “What matters more to us is continuing to move forward — to keep growing, experimenting and seeing where the next story takes us.”
English (US) ·