The marketing team behind S.S. Rajamouli's (Eega )
Baahubali have really begun to turn up the heat, and
after nearly 2 years in production we're starting to get
solid looks at some of the amazing imagery the film has
to offer. Today we get our first official character poster
for Shivudu, the film's protagonist played by Prabhas.
The image is strong, as is Shivudu by the looks of it,
and does a fine job of continuing to create buzz for
what is likely to be one of India's biggest hits of the
year both at home and abroad.
Baahubali didn't appear out of nowhere, though,
Rajamouli has been working toward this kind of
breakout success for a while in a Telugu film industry
mired in predictability. While he's worked within the
confines of the Tollywood film machine for over a
decade, even back to his earliest films you can see a
touch of daring and the urge to move beyond that few
Tollywood filmmakers have, and even fewer who work
within the mainstream.
Rajamouli has made a solid career out of creating mold-
shattering star vehicles for Tollywood royalty like Jr NTR
(Yamadonga ), Ravi Teja (Vikramarkudu ), and even
Baahubali's star Prabhas (Chatrapathi). However, it was
with Eega , a film with huge ambitions, an amazing high
concept, and absolutely no big time star power, that
Rajamouli finally made his mark on the world. Baahubali
follows up on that success with this most ambitious
project in Telugu cinema to date.
Helping him to conquer the world outside of Andhra
Pradesh is Bollywood big-shot Karan Johar's Dharma
Productions, one of the biggest film production houses
in India. Baahubali will be released worldwide day and
date in three languages, which is not uncommon for big
budget films, what is unusual is getting a Bollywood
production house involved at this early stage. Eega ,
retitled as Makkhi for the Hindi market a few months
after its initial release in the summer of 2012, was among
the very first truly successful south Indian films on
North Indian screens, which piqued the interest of the
Bollywood establishment and is going to allow this film
to spread much further than it could have one its own.
The excitement from all over the world is palpable, and
for those of us who are intimately familiar with
Rajamouli's ambition and history of radical innovation,
it's going to be a long 10 weeks until Baahubali opens in
July.
In the meantime, we have Prabhas' abs to keep us
company.
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