Epic tales: How Tollywood is reshaping Indian cinema

A fast-rising parallel film industry in India is competing with Bollywood’s musicals and action-packed films and has taken the world by storm: It’s called Tollywood.

As Mumbai is to Hindi films — or Bollywood — the southern Indian city of Hyderabad is to movies made in Telugu, one of the country’s most widely spoken languages. Tollywood films like “RRR” and “Baahubali” have achieved international acclaim at the box office and on the awards stage.

The Telugu-language film industry, widely known as Tollywood, is one of India’s many regional movie-producing centers. But it’s drawn national and global audiences with its high-adrenaline action movies, mythic storylines and grand visual style. It has carved out its own identity separate from Hindi-language Bollywood by leaning toward star-driven spectacle and large-scale epics.

Tollywood primarily operates out of Hyderabad, which is home to Ramoji Film City. The 1,666-acre (674-hectare) facility, recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest film studio complex, houses massive film studio complexes, dozens of production houses, warehouses, movie sets and post-production facilities. The industry churns out around 300 films every year — fewer than Bollywood but still enough to make it one of India’s largest regional industries.

Tollywood’s growing exposure was in large part sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, as the rapid expansion of streaming services in India allowed regional films to find wider audiences. That expansion also coincided with Bollywood’s struggle to lure audiences back to theaters amid repetitive storylines and rehashes of hits from other languages.

What has also worked in favour of Tollywood is that it offers a rare balance of high-octane action films and nuanced movies charged with real human drama.

“Telugu people have a lot of interest in movies. The Telugu audience watch and accept all kind of movies. They are cinema lovers,” says filmmaker TV Ravi Narayan, who is working on a biopic based on an 18th-century social activist. “Because they are cinema lovers, be it ‘Baahubali,’ ‘Pushpa’ or ‘RRR,’ be it big budget or small budget, be it realistic or biopics or fantasy movies, the audiences accept it.”

Tollywood is known for its high-energy storytelling, big action set pieces and grand spectacle that are heavy on visual effects. It often blends family drama, action and mythology into movies, increasingly marketed as “pan-India” releases and dubbed in multiple regional languages.

The films, like other big Indian productions, have crowd-pleasing visuals and feature viral songs and dances central to the narrative and usually presented as grand performance set pieces.

Many Tollywood films are also remade in Bollywood, which has become a proven formula to expand Telugu cinema across India. Dubbing — where actors record voice-overs in Hindi or a professional voice artist replaces the track — is also a standard and tested practice that has made Tollywood more accessible.

The industry does also produce smaller, low-budget films that tend to focus on stories rooted in Telugu culture. Most of them are set in rural landscapes and explore themes such as social issues, regional cultures and class inequality. Some of those films are sent straight to streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, where they enjoy a wide reach across India.

Many Tollywood movie stars like Mahesh Babu, Allu Arjun, Prabhas, Ram Charan and NT Rama Rao Jr. command a near-godlike following, with devoted fan bases that cut across generations. Their movie releases are often tied to regional religious festivals and are preceded by carefully marketed music launch events and dance performances that are a spectacle in itself. Tens of thousands of fans attend such events, as they did recently with the first look of S.S. Rajamouli’s “Varanasi.”

Associated Press