‘Disaster’: SS Rajamouli reveals the pure terror and Rs 70 cr deficit behind Baahubali

His co-producer at Arka Mediaworks, Prasad Devineni, called the fundraising process itself “crazy.” “I think the most expensive film in Telugu cinema till then was Magadheera. Now we were talking about raising almost five times the budget of that film. Sometimes the shoot would be in two days, and we still wouldn’t have money ready. We were always running around trying to raise money,” he said.

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Prabhas, who played the title role, recalled just how steep the daily costs got. “After a few days, the per day cost came up to Rs 25 lakhs, or more. Our four days of war sequence could fund a small film, about 12 years back. We were rolling out Rs 1 crore every four days,” he said. He also revealed how precarious the financing was in practice.

Betting on a pan-India release

Securing markets beyond the Telugu states was, in Rajamouli’s words, never wishful thinking. “We couldn’t depend on Telugu States alone to get our returns on this film. We were banking on it a 100% to make sure this movie is profitable,” he said. That search led to Karan Johar, whose first reaction to the project left actor Rana Daggubati, who played Bhallaladeva, stunned. “He said, ‘Rana, are you telling me y’all are making a 200-crore war film in Telugu?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re doing.’ He said, ‘Okay, I don’t really understand what you’re saying. Why don’t you come to Bombay and talk to me?'” Rana recalled. After seeing stills, Johar’s tone changed entirely. “He said, ‘Rana, this is what we have to do. Are you ready to watch India’s biggest motion picture? That should be on every poster and every piece of marketing,'” Rana said.

The release date itself carried its own risk. “So after several postponements, we finally settled on a release date, exactly one week before the release of Salman Khan’s film on Eid. And in Hindi cinema, the week before Eid is usually considered a dead week,” Prabhas said, with Shobu noting how high the stakes were for a film “that had no actors from Hindi, or relatively unknown actors in the Hindi belt.”

“We worked on Baahubali as if we were possessed or in a trance. We didn’t even stop to think if we’d make all this money back,” Rajamouli said. The real scale of the spend only hit the team days before release. “When we got hold of the first copy a couple of days before the release, that’s when it hit us how much the budget was. The last three days were pure terror. I think we spent around Rs 220 crores,” he said. On release day itself, the numbers still didn’t add up.

“On the day of the release of part one, we had a deficit of Rs 70 crores. What we spent minus what we recovered was Rs 70 crores,” Prasad said, with Shobu pointing out that “the concept of streaming rights didn’t exist” and satellite rights hadn’t been sold yet either.

The strain reportedly reached into Shobu’s own home. “His 8-year-old son asked his mother, Lakshmi, ‘Are we selling the house, mom? Where are we going to live?’ It was painful to hear all this after 10 years,” Prabhas said.

A brutal split in reception

What followed was an immediate, brutal split in reception. “The film opened to rave reviews in Hindi, as well as the US, the Gulf and all over the world. But the majority of money was supposed to come in from Andhra and Telangana. The reviews here were terrible, to say the least. An image of Shiva holding a Zandu Balm instead of the Shiv Ling was being circulated,” Rajamouli said. Visibly emotional recalling the period, Prabhas described the whiplash between markets, with Rana recounting how he’d called repeatedly to check on specific scenes after Mumbai’s screening went well, only for the news from Hyderabad to tell a completely different story. “Did we watch the same film? I wondered. They said there were mixed reviews, but no, it was outright negative talk,” Rana said.

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As the backlash spread, associate producer Karthikeya Vijay Yarlagadda, Shobu’s son, recalled a breaking point of his own. “People had already started bashing us on Twitter. We were on the verge of breaking down. I was crying, and as I was heading upstairs to get ready for a show, I saw Dad walking down the corridor. I went up to him, hugged him, and burst into tears,” he said. Rajamouli revealed just how dire the talk had become behind the scenes. “They’re calling it the biggest disaster in Indian cinema. Those were the kinds of messages he was getting,” he said of a distributor friend, adding that the panic pushed the team to quietly discuss “a safe budget for part two, so we don’t end up losing money,” even though, as he put it, “it was obvious we couldn’t afford it.” The fear, by his own account, was absolute. “As far as we were concerned, it was the end of our careers.”

The turnaround, when it came, arrived almost overnight. By that evening, the mood had already begun to shift, and the very next Sunday, Shobu went to Prabhas’s house for a small get-together, where filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma was also present. “He said, ‘Shobu, until yesterday, you were considered a big fool. Everybody thought you were doing something crazy, and you didn’t know what you were doing. Today, you’re considered a genius. So, welcome,'” Shobu recalled, before Varma gave him a hug. “I still remember how perceptions changed overnight,” he said, reflecting on how quickly the same decision can be branded reckless one day and visionary the next.

From the following week, the numbers backed up that shift in tone. Collections in the Telugu states began breaking records, while Hindi market traction held strong as well, finally, in Shobu’s words, putting the team into “safe territory.”