But Prabhas was always not the star he is. In fact, it was Baahubali, that turned him into a box office asset overnight. To be fair it was Baahubali 2! Talking about how Baahubali created intrigue around one single sentence – Katappa ne Baahubali Ko Kyun Maara, Marketing Director Varun Gupta talked about how it was never a part of Baahubali’s marketing scheme, but it was a better-planned organic scheme that just happened.

In an exclusive conversation with Koimoi, Varun talked at length about how marketing affects and dominates a film at the box office. Being a part of the marketing team for Prabhas’s Baahubali as well as Kalki 2898 AD, Varun explained how Baahubali changed Prabhas’s fate in the industry.

Varun said, “There is no way it could be planned. And it wasn’t planned for the very simple reason that nobody was expecting Bahubali to do what it did. I’m talking about the first part in the North. Yes, everyone believes in Rajamouli Sir’s vision. None of us had seen the whole film before the release of the film. So we didn’t know what happened in the end. So it was not accidental. It wasn’t planned. But I would say it was organic. When audiences actually started talking, having a conversation, and asking why did Katappa kill Bahubali? So, that became a conversation nationwide in all languages.”

Talking about how Prabhas was also not a star, he explained, “In fact, Tamannaah was more known in the North than Prabhas at that point in time. Rana Daggubati was more known.”

Talking about how Baahubali brought another global star to the front, Varun Gupta explained the viewing pattern before and after the Baahubali era. “Initially, it was only the brand Shah Rukh Khan that used to work from India internationally, right? There’s no Bollywood, there’s no Hollywood, there’s nothing. Because he was somebody who was catering and making the kind of films that were catering to the NRI audiences. So let’s understand that when we talk about international markets, it wasn’t that foreigners were watching our film. It was the Indians in the foreign country watching our film.”

Explaining the global box office dynamics further, he explained, “The quality and the scale of filmmaking has gone up, and Baahubali becomes a major contributor over there, where even then the foreigners started looking at Indian films in a certain light that certain tenfold films, like an RRR, you see how many non-Hindi or non-Indian viewers have seen and appreciated. Right. You know, that can now be spoken about the quality of filmmaking. But initially, it was just the draw that Shah Rukh Khan had in foreign lands. But what has helped is the quality of content and more audiences going and settling out in international markets.”

For the unversed, Prabhas became the darling of the Nation in the North apart from the South while he ruled globally at the box office after Baahubali 2 broke records with a 100+ crore opening worldwide. The same kind of hysteria was built for Kalki 2898 AD, and trade experts suggest that the film might open at 200 crore worldwide.