Producers Prateek Chakravorty and Shruti Nallappa of Pramod Films acquired the Tamil remake rights of the Malayalam film Charlie by Martin Prakkat, in February 2016. The producers were initially keen to retain Parvathy Thiruvothu from the original version, and considered either Vijay Sethupathi, Sivakarthikeyan or Siddharth to play the titular role. In April 2016, Madhavan was signed on to play the lead role, while Prakkat agreed to also direct the Tamil version. The director later opted out and A. L. Vijay was signed in June 2016 to helm the project, and agreed in principle to take up the project after the completion of his commitments on Devi and Vanamagan. In January 2017, actress Sai Pallavi signed on to play the leading female role, with the makers announcing that production would soon begin in Ooty and Pondicherry. Following several months of inactivity, director Vijay confirmed in June 2017 that he would be prioritising other projects and the adaptation of Charlie was indefinitely postponed. He opted to instead work on the bilingual drama Karu with the dates he had for Sai Pallavi, and completed an alternate project for Pramod Films, the dance film Lakshmi. In June 2018, Pramod Films announced that they would make the film under the title of Maara with director Dhilip Kumar signed on to replace Vijay. Dhilip confirmed that the makers were keen to retain Madhavan for the film despite the change of crew, believing that only the actor had the "innate charm" meant for the character of the lead protagonist. Dhilip stated that the makers were initially apprehensive about casting Shraddha Srinath as the lead actress, as she had already been paired with Madhavan in Vikram Vedha, but finalised her because Maara was in a different genre. The director also suggested that he felt both Madhavan and Shraddha shared the real-life characteristics of their on-screen roles. Dhilip worked on editing the script, while the additional screenplay was written by Bipin and dialogues were written by Neelan. Ghibran was signed as the film's music composer, Deepak Bhagwan was selected to be the cinematographer and Malayali art director Ajayan Challisery was also picked to join the crew. The actors completed a week-long rehearsal before the start of shoot, with production beginning in Pondicherry on 18 June 2018. The film was subsequently put on hold and Madhavan later became busy with the production of his first directorial venture, , meaning that there was a schedule break of over a year. In October 2019, production restarted in Kochi with child actor Minon and comedian Alexander Babu joining the cast. The film entered post-production in mid 2020.
