According to superstar Indian director S. S. Rajamouli, it sure sounds like his biggest-profile work to date is heading directly toward a mega sequel. The creator of Baahubali and 2022’s explosive RRR says planning for the RRR sequel is underway in its early staged, with his father V. Vijayendra Prasad working on the screenplay.
“My father is the story writer for all my films,” explained Rajamouli at a screening in Chicago this weekend, according to Variety. “We discussed a bit about RRR 2, and he’s working on the story.”
That likely puts RRR a ways out, but Rajamouli is a director who gets these massive projects done, once he sets his mind to them. One might think of him as India’s answer to the likes of James Cameron, making technical masterpieces incorporating the latest technology in ways his peers can only dream of. RRR was one of the most expensive films the country has ever produced, at a budget of roughly $72 million. It became a global sensation, especially after arriving on Netflix in the U.S., which also hosts Rajamouli’s Baahubali series of historical epics.
RRR has been a huge moment for Indian film, especially because it hails from “Tollywood,” or Telegu language cinema, which has upended the more internationally known Bollywood in recent years as the cinema market of India has diversified and become a more level playing field. The film is a heavily fictionalized account of 1920s Indian freedom fighters Komaram Beem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan), whose bromance in the face of the repressive British government forms the heart of its anti-authority storyline.
Rajamouli, to be sure, has a full plate of upcoming projects, being committed to an upcoming film with actor Mahesh Babu that will likely be his next project. Described as being a “jungle adventure set in Africa,” the unnamed film is expected to begin production in 2023. Rajamouli has described it as a “globetrotting action adventure, it’s going to be a kind of James Bond or Indiana Jones film with Indian roots.”
Likewise, Rajamouli has for years been slowly working on developing an entire series of film epics based on iconic Indian myth cycle Mahabharata, which he’s said in the past would be an “at least” four-part project that would require up to a decade to complete. We can’t wait to see what those films would look like, but hopefully we’ll get the (relatively) more straightforward RRR sequel first, before Rajamouli embarks on the project he likely considers his magnum opus.