PAN-INDIA FILMS: FEW HITS, MANY DUDS

Some southern films may be runaway hits in their home market but their Hindi dubs bomb at the box office

- Lata Jha

For as long as movie buffs can remember, Salman Khan has been the undisputed king of the Eid box office. In 2015, however, a week before the release of his cross-border emotional drama Bajrangi Bhaijaan for the festive weekend, the unthinkable happened.

A Telugu film, dubbed in Hindi and featuring names no one had heard of, took cinemas across north India by storm, squeezing theatres and competing for eyeballs. Directed by S.S. Rajamouli, a filmmaker then unknown in the Hindi belt, Baahubali: The Beginning sparked what could only be described as madness in theatres.

With opening day earnings of ₹5.15 crore, the larger-than-life project with its Mahabharat and Amar Chitra Katha-inspired storytelling, ended its first week in North Indian theatres with over ₹46 crore. By the end of its northern run, it would rake in nearly ₹120 crore. The epic action film, reportedly the most expensive Indian production at the time of release, had been made with a budget of ₹180 crore. Its overall collection across languages stood at ₹650 crore.

Baahubali's success was an unprecedented feat for dubbed southern fare that was until then ridiculed for over-the-top theatrics and relegated to satellite television channels.

In the two years that Rajamouli took to come up with the second instalment, the question 'Why Katappa killed Baahubali?' emerged not just as a source of pan-Indian curiosity-feeding countless memes and jokes-but also spearheaded the film's promotional campaign, with the 'WKKB' hashtag trending on social media. The gamble paid off; in 2017, Baahubali 2 crossed ₹1,000 crore in world box-office earnings across the four languagesHindi, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam-it released in. To put that in perspective, no Indian movie had until then even come close to earning ₹1,000 crore.