Brand Rajamouli is here to stay

First things first! There should no room for doubt that ace director S S Rajamouli is drawing overwhelming crowds on the strength of his name and not because of the star cast that is assembled You could rarely miss in the title cards if his films – A rubber stamp ‘A’ film by S S Rajamouli- has struck a chord with viewers and they are trusting him more than anybody else to feed them with good dose of entertainment in simple paisa vasool terms.

With due respect to Prabhas and Daggubati Rana, it was Rajamouli who overshadowed every actor in his film and stands like a colossus in the mighty success of Bahaubali. Now he holds one to 10 position in T-town (a la Amitabh Bachchan in his heyday) and leaving his rivals like Trivikram Srinivas, Srinu Vytla, Puri Jagannath way behind for sheer magnetic appeal. He has even spend shivers down the spine of even a few B-town directors who were left dumb-founded with the unprecedented openings.

Most of the top Telugu directors rely on a big star to pull in crowds, but Rajamouli proved that with tasteful potboilers backed by technical excellence he can keep audience glued to their seats even for three hours and still draw repeat audience. Earlier, t-town had some celebrated directors like Bapu, K Vishwanath, K Balachander, Jandhyala, Dasari who pulled in the movie-goers on the strength of their names but now it is Rajamouli, who is holding fort and is expected to rule the roost for more years to come.

We are not comparing the content of his films with above-mentioned directors, but taking their names to say that this generation too has a filmmaker who can attract viewers, on his own. However, Rajamouli should thank his guru K Raghavendra Rao from whom he learnt to make larger-than-life movies loaded with songs, colourful sets and big-bang action episodes to get closer to masses and classes in equal measure.

His marketing and pre and post-promotional blitz, should be imbibed by every director to create hype and hoopla around their films. He revived re-incarnation formula with “Maghadheera” and tasted tremendous success and dished out comic-caper Maryadaramanna with Sunil and again struck gold to prove his versatility in handling different genres.

However, Rajamouli raised the bar on Telugu cinema with sci-fi thriller Eega and conquered South India with one stroke as the tale of house-fly rocked Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala and now with folklore fantasy Bahubali he has swept pan-Indian viewers off their feet.

Even Rajamouli would admit that this time around, he relied more on machoism, visual splendour and technical finesse over content and still managed to establish new records all over India. He even surpassed hit-maker Shankar of Robot fame in cracking the B-town success formula with Baahuballi and win over pan-India audience.