Rana Daggubati spoke about the enormous debt that was taken to make Baahubali. The actor said that until a few years ago, the Telugu industry was not organised financially.
Baahubali, starring Rana Daggubati and Prabhas, altered the course of the Indian entertainment industry and will be recognised as a landmark movie for many years to come. However, the film’s creators were under tremendous financial strain as they undertook the enormous challenge of producing a movie of this magnitude. Since the Telugu business at the time did not operate on a studio model, Rana has now discussed the amount of money that was borrowed to produce the Baahubali films. The hundreds of crores invested in the movie were borrowed from banks at exorbitant interest rates.
Rana was speaking about the money that’s invested in the Telugu film industry. “Three-four years ago, where was money in the movies coming from? It was either their (filmmaker’s) house or their property that was pledged to bank, made on interest, and it comes back. We used to pay around 24-28 per cent interest. That’s the borrowing in films. For a film like Baahubali, a borrowing of Rs 300-400 crore at that interest,” he said.
Rana told India Today that when they released the first part of the film, the makers had borrowed over Rs 180 crore at 24 per cent interest over five and a half years. “Part 1 was a struggle. We spent twice over the highest collected film in Telugu. So no math ever made justification of what we borrowed, how we made it. It was 180 crore plus borrowed at 24 per cent interest over five-and-a-half years. We shot a little bit of Baahubali 2 as well, so if this film didn’t work, we didn’t know what will happen,” he said.
