Richie (formerly titled as Santa Maria and Avargal) is a 2017 Indian Tamil-language action crime film directed by Gautham Ramachandran and written by Rakshit Shetty.

The film opens on Boxing Day with Megha, a news reporter from Chennai who is writing a story about the mysterious death of a young man named Richard K. Sagayam alias Richie, who was shot dead during a Santa Claus parade in the port city of Thoothukudi.

By questioning many villagers, Megha learns that Richie was wrongly sent to the reform school for killing a classmate, even though his childhood best friend Raghu was the culprit.

After leaving school, Richie returned to his hometown and became the henchman of Isaac Annachi, the don of the city who controlled the local fisherman community.

One evening, "Kaaka" Peter, a local fisherman, finds an ancient statue in the sea and tries to sell it by himself to a smuggler from Kolkata.

On Christmas morning, Raghu manages to track down the house of Murugesh, Richie's friend from the reform home and another member of Annachi's gang.

In 2012, Gautham Ramachandran met Nivin Pauly and the pair began discussing the idea of making a bilingual film.

They developed several story lines but then chose to purchase the remake rights of Rakshit Shetty's Kannada film Ulidavaru Kandanthe (2014), after being impressed with the script.

[2] Gautham began working on the script during June 2015 and revealed that nearly 40 drafts were made as he changed the screenplay of the original to fit in with the Tamil milieu.

Nivin Pauly had also worked closely with Gautham on scripting the Tamil version, with the pair dropping their initial plans of making it a bilingual venture in Malayalam too.

[6] Veteran producer G. K. Reddy, the father of actor Vishal, was signed on to play a supporting role in the film during the first schedule.