Pachyderm Payoff

TV producer’s Bahubali is a sensational departure from India’s cinematic routine.

- Anuradha Raghunathan

India’s most expensive film franchise—Bahubali—is all about scale, lavish sets and special effects. It’s been the talk of action cinema for months.

Yet the bold budget of $70 million comes from a small TV production house in the southern Indian state of Telangana.

Arka Mediaworks’ cofounder and 50% owner Shobu Yarlagadda, 46, started with a simple mandate: “Bahubali should awe you. It should blow your mind away.”

True to that dictum, Arka created a mythological magnum opus set in the fictional kingdom of Mahismati, using the face-off between two formidable cousins as the centerpiece.

The vision paid off. The second film in the two-part franchise, Bahubali: The Conclusion, is the second-largest grosser in Indian cinema, notching $265 million. (No. 1, released six months ago, is a Hindi wrestling movie, Dangal, by Aamir Khan Productions, which is making waves in China. See sidebar, p. 14.)

Bahubali was released on thousands of screens in multiple languages across the globe in late April. It garnered $20 million in the U.S.—which was the top-performing international market. Arka expects revenues of $86 million from the second movie, along with pretax profits topping $30 million. It made $17 million in satellite rights alone across the two films.

But Bahubali was an entrepreneurial leap of faith for Arka. “It was like making seven to eight movies at the same time,” admits Yarlagadda, an environmental engineer turned producer, who runs Arka along with his wife’s cousin Prasad Devineni, who owns the other half of the company.