How did 'Baahubali' achieve the unthinkable?

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Published: Friday,May 05, 2017 16:30 PM GMT-06:00

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By having the ambition of becoming the first PAN India film from the day one of the start of the project!

"Baahubali wasn't just a dream it was a well laid out plan. The makers of the movie were very clear before the start of the project in 2013 that it has to be made into a pan India film. And they not only had this ambition but put efforts and resources behind it. Before the film went into shooting mode Spice PR , one of the leading Mumbai based communications agency was hired on the project with a specific brief. Make Baahubali a national film", says a source close to the movie in Hyderabad.

"The ambition on the part of the makers was clear and so was their determination. Every filmmaker thinks that he or she is making possibly the biggest film of the country, specially during the planning stage, but here things were different. SS Rajamouli and Shobu had amazing clarity about he project. In our first meeting itself we released the sweep and the canvass would be something that Indian screens haven't seen before." says Prabhat Choudhary of SPICE.

"Having said that it was a task that wasn't achieved before. We knew one thing and that was the immense power of Indian storytelling. It's the storytelling and the Indianness of it that gave this film the pan Indian appeal. But we extensively reached out to each and every region of India to make sure that it resonates all across. For example Baahubali team was in Punjab celebrating Baisakhi this year. Every Indian festival whether it was Shivratri or Diwali was a platform for us to assert the Indianness of the film. And here we had the first pan India film", Choudhary adds.

The appeal of the film clearly travelled outside the Telugu market and the content itself had a lot to do with it. SS Rajamouli's vision and his reason why the film would be watched all across India is as clear. Earlier in a press meet the director aptly said "I strongly believe the stories we have, the epics of India, the Mahabharata, Ramayana, all the history, have a very rich culture and history that we've been ignoring for so long. We have been trying to ape western films. I don't have anything against it, but when we have such a treasure trove with us, it only makes sense to exploit it."

People thought we were fools, says Shobu Yarlagadda to a leading magazine. "They wrote us off even before the release of the [first] film. But we firmly believed in the vision".

Baahulabi has achieved the unthinkable. We can only see that it was a job of hardcore specialists doing better than their bests.