'Baahubali' to 'Pushpa': How Telugu Cinema Overtook Bollywood and Birthed the 'Pan-Indian' Phenomenon

"Pan-Indian” is a fairly new phrase that entered the daily lexicon of the Indian movie enthusiast around 10 years ago. It all started in 2015 with the release of director S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Beginning, the first of a two-part historical fantasy that was originally made in the Telugu language. The film was an instant hit, and by the end of its run had become the second highest-grossing Indian movie of all time, right behind Hindi blockbuster PK (2014).

Until Baahubali: The Beginning, there was no need for a film to be called “pan-Indian”, since it was assumed that only the Hindi film industry could produce a film that would be watched across the length and breadth of this culturally and linguistically diverse country.

For context, Telugu is only the fourth-most widely spoken language in India, after Hindi, Bengali and Marathi. Hindi is spoken by 520 million people, while only 81 million speak Telugu. Yet it took the nationwide success of a Telugu movie for a term as generic and all-encompassing as “pan-Indian” to become a part of popular culture.

This phrase can roughly be defined as descriptive of a product that is designed to cater to a viewer from almost every demographic of India, a country with as many as 22 official languages, 2,000 dialects and 1.4 billion people.

India is also the largest producer of feature films in the world, with an average production of 1,500 to 2,000 films a year. The Hindi film industry is just one of eight major film-producing industries of India, with films being made in other languages such as Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi. While the Hindi film industry produces as many as 300 films a year, the Telugu film industry produces an average of 200 to 250 films every year.

The Impact of Baahubali: The Beginning

But with the release of Baahubali, there was a method that went into creating the first pan-Indian movie. It was the first Telugu film to get a simultaneous release across the world on as many as 4,000 screens. To pull this off, the film’s producers, Arka Media Works, partnered with some of the biggest distributors of each region, including Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions for the film’s Hindi dubbed version. All this for a film that featured no recognisable stars for the Hindi viewer and a budget that was ballooning towards ₹180 crore.

“In hindsight, it’s not easy to explain the magnitude of the risk we were taking,” says Baahubali’s producer, Shobu Yarlagadda of Arka Media Works. “Months into production, we knew the budgets were going to be so high that we needed the film to work beyond the Telugu-speaking audience to recover shooting costs. But we were unsure if the Hindi audiences would come to the theatre to watch a movie with a cast they did not recognise.”

But Yarlagadda had noticed something peculiar about the rising success of Hollywood superhero movies. “What inspired us was the success of the Marvel movies in India,” he recalls. “[Moviegoers] went in to see Iron Man and not Robert Downey Jr. We felt we had a shot if we could create curiosity about the larger-than-life character of Baahubali.”

Apart from the marketing and the powerful distributors Team Baahubali had chosen to partner with, they also planned for the Hindi dub a year before the film’s release. “It wasn’t an afterthought like how other Telugu movies were getting dubbed back then. We had a budget allocated to hire the best teams; when the film released, a large section of the audience mistook it for an original Hindi film,” adds Yarlagadda.

But to fully understand the impact Baahubali had on the Indian film industry, one would have to wait for the release of its sequel two years later, when Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017) opened to the highest opening-day figures for any Indian film until that time. The film collected ₹152 crore in one day, a record it held on to for five years until Rajamouli’s next film, the global phenomenon RRR, overtook it in 2022. Its impact was, naturally, wider than box-office numbers alone.

According to The Times of India, the cliffhanger the first film ended on — “Why did Kattappa kill Baahubali?” — became the most Googled question in India on the day the sequel was released. Prabhas, the lead actor who played the titular character Baahubali in both films, became the biggest star in India, with every film of his releasing in multiple languages since then.

Today, 4 of the top 10 all-time highest-grossing films in India are all in Telugu. Director Rajamouli is now considered filmmaking royalty in India and is currently shooting the most expensive Indian film ever produced, a ₹1,000 crore epic with the working title SSMB29 and featuring Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu alongside global star Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who achieved her popularity in Bollywood productions.

“Baahubali started the trend of films being envisioned as two-parters,” says Yarlagadda. “It started the trend of films being built into a franchise and it also started what we now call pan-Indian cinema. Until then, there was no such thing as Indian cinema. Just Hindi cinema and other regional language movies. It even changed superstardom. Telugu actors... are today India’s biggest superstars, on par with Hindi stars like Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan.”

Thanks to Baahubali, the power dynamics began to shift from the big production studios in Mumbai to those that operate out of Hyderabad. According to media consulting firm Ormax, in 2019 Hindi releases sold 341 million tickets, but by 2022 that number had plummeted to 189 million. Over the same period, Telugu films went from 182 million tickets sold to 233 million.

In Bollywood

Things have only gotten worse for Bollywood since. A 2024 box office report published by Ormax stated that “31 per cent of Hindi cinema’s collections came from dubbed versions of South Indian films. If only original Hindi language films are considered, the decline in box office was a steep 37 per cent [compared to 2023].” Yet the most shocking number to have come out of the report was that by the end of 2024, the highest grossing Hindi film of all-time was the Hindi dub of Telugu movie Pushpa 2: The Rule, which collected ₹889 crore.

Up until Baahubali: The Beginning, Bollywood was the most popular movie industry of the country primarily because Hindi is the most widely spoken language. This allowed for Hindi films to be released across India without the need for them to be dubbed into other regional languages. Bollywood movies also had the most amount of viewership outside of the country, with active audiences in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the Middle East, in addition to a few hits that attained cult status in both Europe and North America.

“These were films that connected with the Western audience, not just because it was new for them to discover Indian films with song and dance,” says Yarlagadda. “But these Hindi films were also about NRIs, or non-resident Indians, who lived in the UK or US. It also helped that these films found a release with English subtitles, unlike other language Indian films of the period.”

But seamless dubbing changed all that. Roughly since the release of Baahubali: The Conclusion in 2017, the Hindi-speaking audience has begun to gravitate towards films from other regions when they are dubbed and get a simultaneous release across the country.

Inspired by the success of Baahubali from the Telugu industry or Tollywood, every other South Indian movie industry has since tried to make their version of a pan-Indian film, but with limited success. But only three films have managed to create a major mark among Hindi-speaking viewers and they have all emerged out of the much smaller Kannada film industry. They are: KGF: Chapter 1 (2018), KGF: Chapter 2 (2022) and Kantara (2022). KGF: Chapter 2 is now the fifth-highest grossing Indian film of all-time and on YouTube, the movie has amassed more than 340 million views.

“Hindi cinema continues to remain number one if you consider footfalls of people who watch a movie in its Hindi version,” says Mukesh Manjunath, a Telugu film critic and author based out of Telangana. “The total number of people who watched last year’s Pushpa 2: The Rule in Telugu was around 20 million. This year’s biggest Hindi film, Chhaava, was watched by around 25 million to 30 million people. But when you add the numbers of people who watched Pushpa 2 in both their Hindi and Telugu versions, that’s when you end up with a true pan-Indian film.” Chhaava ended its run with a total of 28 million admissions, much less than the 63 million people said to have watched Pushpa 2: The Rule in all its versions.

But in addition to increased Hindi dubbing and wider releases, another trend was beginning to emerge a decade ago: Bollywood was becoming a victim of its own success, and class was becoming a key factor. Vishek Chauhan is the CEO of a chain of movie theatres called Roopbani Cinemas located in Bihar, where Bhojpuri is the most widely spoken language. Bihar is also among the poorest states in India, with the majority of the population living in rural spaces. Chauhan says Bollywood productions are often made with primarily an urban audience in mind, ignoring the everyday reality of rural moviegoers who, he says, go to the movies looking for pure escapism, or, as he calls it “maximum entertainment”. Telugu films have found a way to tap into this underserved market.

Says Chauhan: “Before Baahubali, Hindi cinema was considered national cinema, with all other industries being referred to as regional industries. But the success of Baahubali showed us how that perception was changing. Ever since the success of city-centric Hindi films like Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Hindi film producers have been trying to make movies only for the major Indian cities... and they were being made with a particularly Western sensibility. In this process, we ignored Hindi movie viewers who lived in towns and villages and preferred movies that appealed to their regional sensibilities. It is this viewer who has now found joy in watching Telugu films dubbed into Hindi.”

Hollywood came face to face with this rural/urban divide when it attempted to enter the Indian market in the mid 2000s. “None of them, including Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures or Fox Studios were able to make movies that connected with the non-urban Hindi movie audience in the long run,” observes Chauhan. “That’s why they could not survive in India and this phase further alienated the [non-urban] Hindi movie viewer.”

One of these Bollywood titles, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya (2007), which was co-produced by Columbia Pictures and distributed by Sony Pictures, is now considered one of Indian cinema’s biggest flops, earning just around ₹39 crore for its budget of ₹45 crore in 2007. Warner Bros.’ entry into India — 2009’s Chandni Chowk to China — was unsuccessful as well. The part-musical-part-martial-arts-based action comedy ended its run at ₹56 crore.

“You see that Hollywood sensibility popping out of big-budget Hindi films getting made even today,” adds Manjunath. “If you see Pathan (2023), you can see how it’s attempting to create an “Indianised Mission Impossible” with the idea of a globetrotting superspy. Similarly, Fighter (2024) was clearly trying to be an Indian Top Gun (1986). But the Telugu movie that works across the country is still rooted in Indian emotions and mythology. They are not trying to imitate Hollywood.”

Telugu releases were steadily becoming the cinema of the people but, as Chauhan notes, a major factor behind this shift was the ability for rural populations to watch movies online. Before Baahubali drew Hindi-speaking viewers into theatres for a Telugu movie, millions across India were watching Telugu films dubbed into Hindi on what has now become the world’s biggest YouTube channel dedicated to streaming feature films: Goldmines Telefilms, the brainchild of a Mumbai-based entrepreneur named Manish Shah. Sensing an opportunity in the way the Hindi-speaking viewer was looking towards Telugu films for entertainment, Shah founded the YouTube channel in the mid 2000s, and it is now the world’s tenth-biggest YouTube channel with more than 100 million subscribers and annual revenue of roughly ₹400 crore.

Adding to this trend was the fact that India was becoming a country with one of the highest proliferation of smartphones in the world. As a result of intense competition in the telecom industry, data too is among the cheapest in India, which has over 700 million smartphone users. According to a survey published in 2023 on UK-based website Cable.co.uk, India is ranked seventh cheapest in the world when it comes to mobile data. As per this survey, the average cost of one GB of data in India is around ₹13 compared to around ₹500 per GB in the United States.

The Evolution

“I wanted to explore the idea of bringing [Telugu films] to the Hindi audience,” Shah tells THR India. “Since I could get the rights to those films for cheap, I gave it a shot. It all began when I bought the rights to a Telugu film called Mass (2004) and [released a Hindi dubbed version called] Meri Jung: One Man Army. When it was aired on television, it got one of the highest television viewership ratings for any movie until then. That gave me the confidence to buy the rights of more Telugu films to be made into Hindi dubs.”

Anurag Kashyap, one of Hindi cinema’s most prolific filmmakers, explains how two of his critically acclaimed films — Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) and Mukkabaaz (2017), both gritty tales set in India’s smaller states — were not distributed in the regions where they were shot. “They did this because the studios decided my core audience is in Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Chandigarh. What happened is that we made Hindi movies, but we ignored the Hindi core audience who lived outside of the cities. The advantage of this was taken by [Shah], who [created] a market by uploading Telugu dubbed films on his YouTube channel.”

The views for some of these Telugu movies in their Hindi-dubbed versions speak to their popularity. The Hindi dub of a 2016 Telugu release called Sarrainodu has 530 million YouTube views. Another Hindi dub, The Super Khiladi 3 (called Nenu Sailaja in Telugu), has more than 650 million views. In total, out of the top 10 videos on the Goldmines YouTube Channel, eight are those that were dubbed into Hindi from Telugu. They each have upwards of 250 million views on the channel.

According to Shah, it’s the viewers used to watching Telugu films in Hindi either on their TVs or phones who comprised the theatre-going audience when Baahubali released. “The audience was just waiting for that one film to be attractive enough to make them want to go to the cinemas,” he says. “They did that with Baahubali and haven’t gone back since.”

Apart from the timing, Shah also blames Hindi cinema’s shift towards a more realistic, “slice of life” genre of movies for this alienation. He blames the stars in Hindi movies too for not allocating the longer duration it takes to mount larger, action-based films. He says, “It takes 100 to 120 days to make an action movie. You can make a romcom in 40 to 45 days. You don’t need much effort to make romcoms. Today, (Telugu superstar) Allu Arjun has worked for 300 days to make Pushpa 2: The Rule (2024). Which Hindi actor is going to act for 300 days? This is the problem.”

(The other reason, says Shah, is Bollywood’s obsession with remaking South Indian films into Hindi. Since the pandemic, Hindi cinema has released 25 films that were remakes of South Indian movies, leading some to start calling the Hindi film sector “Remakewood”.)

The rise of Telugu cinema may have coincided with a particularly low point for Hindi movie production, but Chauhan is quick to note that the Bollywood of today is in a period of transition. He points to the 2023 hit Jawan — a Hindi-language action film starring Shah Rukh Khan that was directed by South Indian filmmaker Atlee — as a possible way forward.

Manjunath adds that Telugu cinema too has evolved in this period. “Until a decade ago, Telugu cinema was dismissed for its crude presentation or its over-the-top action sequences, which were deemed too unrealistic. It has always been escapist entertainment, but it also never deviated from the emotions that appeals to the common man. Pushpa 2: The Rule may be called an action movie about a smuggler, but it’s also about an outsider trying to find his space in a family.”

Chauhan concludes, “The problem today is that Hindi production houses are making films that 90 per cent of India’s backyard do not want to watch. We’re looking forward to a phase in which South Indian directors from the Telugu or Tamil movie industries will make Hindi films with Hindi stars. When that works, like it did with Jawan (it collected ₹1,148 crore and was the highest earner of 2023), we got a blockbuster. Either way, thanks to Telugu cinema, it looks like all the industries in India will soon merge into one.”

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