Rs 18 Crores Wasted On RRR’s Latest Promotions

Approximately  Rs 18-20 crores  were  wasted in promoting  S S Rajamouli’s eagerly awaited magnum opus RRR for its January 7 release  that now stands postponed indefinitely  due to the  Covid resurgence.

Sources  from Hyderabad divulge that Rajamouli was “super-adamant” this  time  about the release. “And he had  the backing of everyone who counted in the project, from the  producers to the actors. But when the situation   got worse,  Rajamouli had to back down.”

The zero-result  publicity campaign for the  January 7  release has  cost the  producers a staggering Rs 18-20 crores. This  included a  2-3  crore budget for transporting fans  of Ramcharan Teja  and NTR Jr, the two leading men of RRR,   to  promotional events outside Andhra.

A  source  reveals, “Rajamouli is aware that his  two leading men in RRR  have a minimal fan following  outside  Andhra. For  the  media/marketing events in Mumbai and other cities outside  Andhra  fans were  flown and  put up in luxury  hotels. All they had to  do  was  applaud , cheer and whistle for their demi-gods in exchange of the  hospitality.”

Sources say  the  gambit is unlikely to pay off. South heroes from Rajnikanth and Kamal Haasan to  Dulquer Salman and Prabhas have been huge  flops in the Hindi-speaking belt. Prabhas’s Baahubali worked bigtime in the North. But his  followup project  the  posh and costly Saaho bombed  in  the Hindi belt. Ramcharan Teja’s Hindi debut  the  remake of the Amitabh Bachchan blockbuster Zanjeer was  a massive flop.

Once when I had asked the great Malayalam actor  Fahad Faasil why he was not looking at Bollywood  he said politely, “It’s not as  if  I  don’t admire  actors and  directors in Bollywood. I am a big fan of Aamir Khan’s  films. But I don’t have any burning ambition to be  a star in  Bollywood. For one , I don’t think in  Hindi and therefore can’t emote in that language. Secondly,  I don’t feel  doing films in Malayalam is an impediment to  a pan-India  reach. Not any more.”