The films of S.S. Rajamouli have consistently pushed the scale of Indian filmmaking – with blockbusters such as “RRR,” before that the “Baahubali” films. His upcoming feature “Varanasi,” set to release in April 2027, is set to go even further – set across thousands of years and locations as remote and Antarctica, the plot seeing the eponymous city of Varanasi facing down an asteroid. Even the size of the frame is expanding, with the feature to be shot in part on 70mm Imax film. 

Following his surprise appearance at the Annecy Animation Festival work-in-progress panel to introduce the filmmakers of “Baahubali: The Eternal War,” Variety spoke to Rajamouli about progress on “Varanasi.” “What I can say is we have completed a major portion of the shoot, all the important big spectacle action sequences are done,” Rajamouli says. We are [now] into doing the smaller, interconnecting scenes so hopefully, by September, maybe a little bit into October, we should be finishing shooting.” When discussing whether shooting the film on the Imax format had influenced the way he had approached the film creatively, Rajamouli says that it’s quite the opposite.  

“From the beginning, we knew the sequences that were conceived would be best justified in [the] Imax format – we didn’t change anything just for the format,” he says, noting that any adjustments made were minor. “Because our eyes have been trained to shoot in the CinemaScope format, which obviously I love, [we were] just thinking about, we need to frame this [to] look good both in Imax as well as CinemaScope, the anamorphic framing, so that took a little bit of adjustment for the first few initial days. Then we understood how to do it.”  

At the same time as working on “Varanasi,” the “Baahubali” franchise is hoping to deepen the global ties of the Indian animation industry through the upcoming feature “The Eternal War,” directed by Irshan Shukla.  

Considering the balance of working on a feature like “Varanasi” during the production of the animated continuation of “Baahubali,” Rajamouli notes that there’s so much writing and history around “Baahubali” by this point that expanding the story comes fairly naturally. “We have a whole world of ‘Baahubali’ that’s already been written, so we don’t need to dwell when we step into the world of ‘Baahubali,’ there’s a lot of work that’s already done,” he says. “The second part is when a person like Ishan [Shukla] comes in, you see and test the initial whether he has that understanding of how the characters in ‘Baahubali work, ‘and once you see that yes, he understood it, I step back, and I let them take over.”  

Rajamouli is confident in Shukla as well as the move for “Baahubali” into the medium of animation, with consideration of the animation industry in India being somewhat underdeveloped by comparison to its live action feature films. “We always believed ‘Baahubali’ will find success in the medium. It is just about finding the right person, right team, and the right expansion of the story, so we always had the belief in taking the leap,” Rajamouli says. “The moment Ishan came with the idea of taking ‘Baahubali’ into the 14 realms of Indian mythology. I thought, that this is the moment that we were waiting for, and of course, that’s ideation, and the expansion of that ideation is where many people fail.”  

The filmmakers of “The Eternal War” were conscious of an international audience during production, and expressed as much during the work-in-progress presentation. Rajamouli says that the medium perhaps allowed an even greater range of expression, saying that it perfectly captures what he sees as the beauty of Indian stories, which is the “color.” “I don’t just mean color [literally],” he adds, “but the characters, the emotions, and how the emotions are played are very colorful, I think that is very unique to India, and I think the audiences – I won’t say audiences across the whole world – but those have already seen ‘Baahubali’ or ‘RRR,’ or whoever got a taste of that, are definitely waiting for more. Getting all that taste in live action is very difficult, with animation it’s much more feasible, so all of us are very hopeful that ‘Eternal War’ makes that possible.”

The flexibility of the animated medium allows the story of “The Eternal War” to reach mind-boggling scale. Rajamouli has spoken in the past about not letting such scale overtake the emotion of a feature, but he also sees the spectacle as inextricably linked. “I think it is the emotion that drives the bigness of the film. I never see them as two separate things. For me, the emotion is the seed, the spectacle is the tree hidden inside. So, when you choose the seed, you know how it is going to bloom up into that massive tree.” 

The release of “Varanasi” in 2027 is serendipitously timed to the Imax theater returning to the city of Hyderabad. Rajamouli spoke enthusiastically of it, saying  “it was high time we had Imax theaters in Hyderabad, because for me Hyderabad and the states of Telugu-speaking people Andhra and Telangana are the biggest film buffs in the entire world,” Rajamouli says. 

“I believe they love film so much: not just Telugu cinema, they love Hindi cinema, they love Tamil cinema, they love Malayalam cinema, they love English cinema, whatever films are made across the globe, they love it with their heart, and they deserve to have their own Imax.” Rajamouli reminisces that one of the best Imax 70mm projectors used to be in Hyderabad with the Prasad Imax. “But once Imax turned digital and something fell off, and then many other cities were having Imaxs, and we didn’t have that anymore. It was like very frustrating for us as film buffs, but finally it is happening, and I’m so happy for it.”