How did director Priyadarshan managed to establish in Bollywood,?
The answer to both your questions is the late Mr. Neeraj Vora. Priyadarshan had started his bollywwod career in 1992 with Muskurahat,a remake of the Malayalam film Kilukkam, which had directed in 1991. The original was a blockbuster but he failed to recreate the magic in Hindi. He then tried to remake Kireedom into Gardish, which also wasnt a very good remake. While he was prospering in Malayalam with back to back hits with Mohanlal, his repeated attempts at remaking his hits into hindi was in vain, except for Virasat. On the sets of Virasat, he struck a friendship with actor / writer Neeraj Vora. Vora had written for films like Rangeela and Baazi. Priyadarshan assigned Vora the writing duties for the remake of the Malayalam superhit film Ramji Rao Speaking. Priyadarshans previous films were straight on remakes that mostly failed to connect with the North Indian diaspora and the actors in them looked mostly clueless. What worked with malayalam or tamil people was lost in translation. Vora borrowed the plot and structure of Ramji Rao Speaking and adapted it into a subarbab mumbai setting and redesigned the main characters to appeal to the Hindi speaking community. Instead of just translating malayalam dialogue into hindi, he came up with quirky lines and dialogue that still resonate with bollwood fans. Hera Pheri wasnt a ground breaking success, but Priyadarshan was finally able to crack the success formula for remaking malayalam films. Until then he was trying to outdo the malayalam originals with a bigger starcast and bigger movie stars from the country. He realised that was not the way to go about it and had Vora adapt the characters and dialogue to appeal to regular bollywood audiences. Thus began Priyadarshans decade long reign in Bollywood withe log winning streak with only a few occassional hiccups. Even the less successful ones are immensely watchable. Almost all these films were written or co-written by Neeraj Vora. Their creative high point was Bhool Bhulaiyya. Priyadarshan also had other collaborators like Manisha Korde and Mushtaq Sheikh, but their ventures werent as consistent. By the late 2000s Neeraj Vora also started to focus on his own directing career and his films with Priyadarshan started to dwindle. Priyadarshan too returned to directing malayalam films since 2011. They still did films together in between like khatta meetha, De dna dan and Tez. Neeraj Vora also spend a lot of years trying to getting Run Bhola Run released and launchingHera Phera 3 until his illness and untimely demise in 2017. Priyadarshan certainly would have loved to remake the current crop of malayalam films into hindi, but he hasnt found a writer that can match the skills of Vora. Its highly doubtful hell be active again in bollywood as he once was . Besides with advent of OTTs and youtube, North Indian movie goers are now more exposed to and welcoming of Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telegu films remaking them in Hindi is starting to get pointless.