Ever since the days of the movies, the Telugu film industry has generally been considered as second only to the Hindi industry. After Bollywood, tinsel town here has always been in the forefront, not just in the number of films produced, but in its technical excellence too.
On an average, an estimated 150 films are produced annually, with about a 100 more thrown in with films ‘dubbed' from Tamil, Hindi and English predominantly, year after year.
In its latest report, the Central Board of Film Certification certified that the Tamil film industry that was number two in the country after Bollywood, during the year 2008 and 2010 was overtaken by Telugu films.
In 2011, while Bollywood churned out 206 films, the number of Telugu films stood at 192, with Tamil following at 185. In 2010, the Tamil industry saw 202 films hitting screens, while only 181 Telugu movies were made. This being the case as far as the numbers go, the trends of ‘hits' keep changing and while big budget films loaded with the routine commercial elements mostly attract attention at the box office, their smaller, lesser-privileged counterparts draw the spotlight on themselves every now and then solely on the strength of their story and screenplay.
The year 2012 started with the Mahesh ‘Prince' Babu-starrer ‘Businessman' turning out to be a runaway hit, closely followed by ‘Victory' Venkatesh in ‘Bodyguard'. Of the about dozen films to hit the screens this year, these two big budget movies can easily be termed the biggest grosser. On the other end of the spectrum is ‘Ee Rojullo', a small film that was recently released and virtually re-wrote history. Patronised by movie-goers the way it was, it had the makers laughing all the way to the bank.
‘Lovely', that falls under the ‘small film' category did have a more-than-modest budget but went on to do fairly well, as did films like ‘SMS', ‘Love Failure' and ‘Ishq' in what is typically termed ‘more than average', in the industry. An enormous ‘disappointment' though, was Ramcharan Tej's ‘Racha' that failed to elicit the desired response.
Big films
The summer has a slew of really big films lined up including ‘Damarukam', ‘Adhinayakudu', ‘Gabbar Singh', ‘Dharuvu' and ‘Dammu', all with big cast and crew names and of course, ones where the producers has not spared any expense and has gone along with the directors in toto.
