
What’s Wrong With Tollywood?
Something is very much amiss with Tollywood which has the reputation
of being the only cinema industry in the world producing around 150 plus
films every year in one language, Telugu. In spite of the enormous
quantity of production, sadly the quality is missing. Very few Telugu
films had won National Awards and none made an entry into the
International Film Festival circuit. Though 99% of Telugu films follow
the song-dance-fight-drama-comedy formula of the Indian mainstream
commercial cinema, jubilee hits in its own Telugu turf are few and far
between.
The last big hit in Tollywood was Ram Charan’s Magadheera directed by SS Rajamouli in 2009. Later on, all big budget films with top stars – Mahesh Babu’s Khaleja, Pawan Kalyan’s Teen Maar, Ntr Jr’s Shakti, Siddharth’s Anaganaga O Dheerudu , Rana’s Nenu Naa Rakshasi, Ravi Teja’s Veera and Allu Arjun’s Badrinath
have been great disasters at the box office. All these films are
multi-crore productions and a conservative estimate of around Rs 200 cr
of production costs of all these films have gone into the drain.
The only films that did well were NTR Jr’s Brindaavanam, Sunil’s Maryada Ramanna, Prabhas’ Mr Perfect and Naga Chaitanya’s 100% Love. A few small budget films like Ala Modalaindi, Prema Kavali, Seema Tapakai have done well at the box office.
The basic reason for this debacle appears to be that producers and
directors seem to go for grandiose sets and locations and packing the
narration with computer SFX with little concern for basic plot, content
and characterization.

What’s Wrong With Tollywood?
When will Tollywood realize that cinema is fundamentally an
audio-visual story- telling art. Who will watch a movie that induces
yawn after yawn? Even if the commercial cinema format is supposed to be
just entertainment and nothing else, where are the essential ingredients
of entertainment?
It is high time that Tollywood wakes up. Instead of wasting hundreds
of crores on production of star-studded box-office duds, let Telugu
film-makers come out with films with meaningful entertainment. There is
also an urgent need to go for multi-starrers to justify high budget
productions. Look at Bollywood. Amitabh Bachchan acts in multi-starrers. Are our Telugu stars bigger than Big B?