NEW DELHI : Rajesh Jain, a 62-year-old film buff, was taken aback. He couldn’t believe all tickets to the dubbed Hindi version of Telugu action thriller Pushpa: The Rise were sold out on the opening night—at a multiplex in Patna.
He couldn’t believe the city’s Hindi-speaking audience were warming up to a man who didn’t speak their language. There was something endearing about Allu Arjun, the film’s protagonist and one of the highest paid actors in south India. He swaggered along the forests with an axe, fought, drove, sang and danced. In Pushpa, a drama woven around the smuggling syndicate of red sandalwood in Andhra Pradesh, he is the cocky gangster the masses fell in love with.
“It is clear he works very hard to create that style and aura and it’s thoroughly entertaining," Jain concluded, after finally managing to watch the film a few days later.
In the first three weeks since its theatrical opening on 17 December, the film made ₹3.70 crore in Bihar compared to the Bollywood sports drama, ’83, which managed only ₹1.65 crore, trade experts estimated.
But that’s hardly an isolated case. Across India, the film raked in over ₹94 crore up till last weekend. On 23 January, a Sunday, the film collected more in Mumbai city and its suburbs than ’83 did across the country.
And we are talking of a Telugu film whose male lead never had a release in the Hindi heartland before. More surprise: Pushpa arrived in the north Indian theatres with little marketing blitz.
The phenomenal success is now visible across the universe of social media. Even the ministry of information and broadcasting used an Allu Arjun meme to stress on the importance of staying masked. A popular dialogue from the dubbed Hindi version, ‘main jhukega nahi’ was recently adapted to: ‘Delta ho ya Omicron, main mask utaarega nahi’.
The runaway hit has now raised the stakes and ambitions for both Arjun and the makers of Pushpa. Part two of the film is in the works but the shooting is yet to begin. The producers, however, are already busy negotiating deals. Recently, a broadcaster offered to buy the satellite and digital rights for a whooping ₹300 crore. The producers turned it down and demanded ₹370 crore instead. This humongous demand dwarfs what Bollywood films typically fetch. A Hindi film may grant similar rights to a broadcaster for about ₹70-80 crore.
Meanwhile, the success of Pushpa, while stamping the clout of the Telugu film industry, is also part of a larger pattern of south Indian language films gaining universal acceptance. Pushpa is the seventh southern language film to cross the ₹300 crore mark worldwide, with 35% of its domestic collections coming from Hindi-speaking circuits.
Both Telugu and Tamil film industries outdid Bollywood in 2021, partly because big ticket Hindi films started releasing only by November as theatres were closed because of the pandemic. According to trade experts, Telugu cinema led the pecking order with box office collections of ₹1,200 crore in 2021, followed by the Tamil film industry at ₹800 crore and Hindi at ₹700 crore. Ticketing site BookMyShow stated that Telugu and Tamil movies, together, accounted for almost 50% of total tickets sold on the platform last year. In a normal year, Hindi films usually generate 60% of the box office collections.
Heroism, Grand Scale
So, what explains the success of Pushpa?
Allu Arjun attempted an explanation.
“We weren’t expecting this (the success). We were releasing it in Hindi just to test the waters. But deep down, I did have a feeling that it would pay off. I give credit to the Indian multi-genre format—the songs, the fights, the drama, the love story, the humour that the heartland of India has been missing," the actor told an entertainment portal in a video interview soon after the film was released.
Films made abroad, such as those in Hollywood, cater to mostly one genre. That could be a thriller, a horror, a comedy, or a musical. They don’t have something for everyone, a norm that Indian cinema has traditionally subverted, he added.
He stopped short of mentioning that Bollywood was perhaps mimicking Hollywood with its current focus on urban, multiplex audiences, the slice-of-life dramas and bold themes. Think of Andhadhun, Gully Boy, Thappad and many others—these films pretty much shunned the kind of mainstream, escapist cinema that finds universal appeal in small towns. That created a window of opportunity for south Indian language films, particularly the Telugu film industry.
2022 will see several Telugu actors breach linguistic and geographical borders. Prabhas, who already has the Baahubali franchise to his credit, will feature in Radhe Shyam, Adipurush and an untitled film with Deepika Padukone. Vijay Deverakonda’s Liger, produced by Karan Johar, and SS Rajamouli’s RRR, starring Ram Charan and Jr. NTR, are other upcoming titles that will see Telugu actors crossover, albeit supported by dubbed releases and exhaustive marketing campaigns.
“The strength of the Telugu industry is that it understands mass films, heroism, and (the) grand scale very well. It caters to a wide audience," Arjun mentioned in the same interview.
Manish Shah, director at Goldmines Telefilms, told Mint that only two film industries in India are currently making commercial films—Telugu and Tamil—and it is only the former that has worked in the Hindi theatrical market, until now.
“The first thing that’s helping these films is that they have very strong emotions; they are larger-than-life; there is great action and no compromise on technical finesse," said Shah, explaining why Pushpa trumped a high-profile offering like ’83. Goldmines Telefilms released the Hindi version of Pushpa.
Juxtaposed with great action sequences, Arjun’s character has an emotional arc. He is a child born out of wedlock and is fighting for his mother’s respect.
The gold standard for success for southern offerings in north India, the Baahubali franchise, too is essentially a tale of the triumph of good over evil—a king seeks to win back his throne and reinstate his mother’s honour after the father is killed.
“These elements, except for a few songs, are rarely added by Hindi filmmakers anymore," said Shobu Yarlagadda, co-founder and chief executive officer at Arka Mediaworks, the producer of Baahubali. He theorized that the people queuing up for Arjun’s dubbed films may be the same that wait for the annual Salman Khan potboiler—Khan’s films, too, offer that escape from the complexities of real life, for a few hours.
However, the big star vehicles are rare and release about four to five times a year, often on festive weekends. Absurd as some of the plots may be, their charm at the box office is undeniable. Khan’s last few theatrical releases, all pre-covid, have made more money than most movies that were released alongside. His Eid offerings over the past three years Bharat (2019), Race 3 (2018) and Tubelight (2017) all crossed the ₹100 crore mark. Bharat is inching towards ₹200 crore mark. They are miles ahead of niche, critically acclaimed multiplex offerings, whose constant churn is making heartland audiences miss regular, commercial fare.
The Satellite Invasion
While theatrical releases are now being considered, the south Indian language films have seen their dubbed versions play on Hindi satellite movie channels to stupendous success for years.
Revenge, vendetta and massy plotline-driven potboilers like the Ram Charan-starrer Yevadu and horror comedies like Kanchana 2 top TV ratings, forming as much as 35-40% of programming schedules.
According to a FICCI-EY report, the biggest blockbusters on television in 2017 were two dubbed Telugu films. Baahubali 2 set an all-time record for TV viewership, with even its repeat airing generating higher numbers than the second most watched film, Aamir Khan’s Dangal. The second was Allu Arjun’s action comedy Duvvada Jagannadham that beat many Hindi films such as Tubelight, Kaabil and Raees.
Actor Vijay’s Tamil film Master, which had set the cash registers ringing when released in theatres last January, had managed an impressive satellite television premiere for its dubbed Hindi version in June 2021 with 6.7 million average minute audience (AMAs), according to estimates from TV monitoring agency BARC. AMA is defined as the number of individuals of a target audience who viewed an ‘event’, averaged across minutes.
The YouTube channel of Goldmines Telefilms that has been playing dubbed south Indian fare has 64.7 million subscribers and their satellite TV channel Dhinchaak continually tops BARC charts in the movie category.
“Most of the south Indian films are technically superior to the films that come out of the Hindi industry. More than anything else, the movies are very smartly made and as an overall package, they have started delving into plots which are not very routine," Neeraj Vyas, senior executive vice-president and business head, Sony SAB and Sony MAX, told Mint in an earlier interview.
“Once a Shah Rukh, Salman or Aamir Khan film releases, it’s seen by a large mass of viewers. When it releases on television after three to four months, you’ll probably watch it once. In between, there is a huge possibility of people watching the film on a streaming application or a pirated platform," Vyas said, adding that the first premiere of the Hindi films does well but then the ratings drop.
A dubbed film from the south is unknown territory. That is why some of them manage ratings higher than Hindi films, Vyas added. “They evoke a lot of curiosity. If you promote them smartly, the ability of south Indian films to give you sustained ratings over a long period of time is a lot," he had said.
Mass appeal
The pan-India ambitions of southern firms aren’t new. They have hunted for newer markets in the north as early as the 1980s. And actors from the south did try their luck in Bollywood.
While Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth were seen in Sanam Teri Kasam (1982) and Andhaa Kaanoon (1983), Chiranjeevi had appeared in Pratibandh (1990) and Aaj Ka Goonda Raj (1992). However, box office success remained elusive and audiences were mostly unreceptive of their unconventional looks and mostly, stilted dialogue delivery.
“It was a time when Hindi audiences didn’t need them (the southern heroes). We had the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, Jackie Shroff and Anil Kapoor who were already making big, action entertainers and mass-market films. In that sense, the format was the same and they (the southern films) weren’t offering anything different," independent exhibitor Vishek Chauhan said.
This changed in the course of the past few years for reasons already mentioned above. Hindi cinema turned elitist, alienating mass audiences and much of the youth—a gap southern language cinema has rushed to fill.
“Also, in the past, there were no streaming platforms to expose the stars of the southern regions. Today, even a boy at the roadside shop watches these films on his phone," Chauhan added.
Pundits point to yet another reason why southern language films are successful. Unlike Bollywood that makes films in a language accessed by more people, regional cinema has, over the years, been inherently aware of being restricted to the home market. Regional film makers, therefore, know they can’t afford to be niche—the films have to work at the lowest common denominator level, even at the smallest of villages in their home state.
Having saturated home audiences, the regional actors and filmmakers are now eyeing newer markets, and making bigger films. But the southern stars are clear—they want to be part of mass films and come across as authentic.
“If you’re authentic in your language, people will get the authenticity in other languages, too. I think I should make a great Telugu film that will have great appeal in other languages. It’s not about Hindi, Tamil or Telugu cinema anymore… the future is all about (all industries coming together on to) one platform called Indian cinema," Arjun said in the video interview.
