S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali has shattered previous box-office records both in India and worldwide collections. The Hindi version too was a great proposition on paper, because the director was very keen to have Sridevi on board in the role of the queen mother. But when she quoted the staggering amount of Rs 6 crore, the project went to Ramya Krishna. The film has been made on a budget of Rs250 crore.
Now that the film is doing so well, we wonder if Sridevi is rueing asking for an astronomical amount. Rajamouli had also wanted to cast Hrithik Roshan in the lead role for the Hindi version. “That would have made sense. Just like in Drishyam, where Mohanlal did the Malayalam version, Kamal Haasan was in the Tamil version and now Ajay Devgn is doing the Hindi version. You can’t have Prabhas in such a massively budgeted pan-India costume drama,” says a prominent producer.
But Rajamouli was always confident of his product. “We had plans to dub and release it in Hindi right from the beginning. The success of Makkhi and the scale of Baahubali are the commercial reasons. The story being universal, with simple human emotions at the core, we were confident that it would appeal to Hindi-speaking audiences as well,” Rajamouli says.
