S.S. Rajamouli has built a reputation for making films that constantly raise the bar for Indian cinema, and it appears his next directorial venture is aiming even higher. After delivering global blockbusters like Baahubali and RRR, the filmmaker is now busy shaping Varanasi, an ambitious epic scheduled to arrive in theatres in April 2027. While fans have been eagerly waiting for fresh updates, Rajamouli has now confirmed that the production has crossed one of its biggest milestones.
Speaking after his appearance at the Annecy Animation Festival, where he introduced the creative team behind the upcoming animated feature Baahubali: The Eternal War, Rajamouli opened up about the progress of Varanasi. Alongside discussing his live-action spectacle, the filmmaker also shared his thoughts on expanding the Baahubali universe through animation and why both projects represent different creative challenges.
Rajamouli Says Varanasi Has Finished Its Biggest Action Sequences
The scale of Varanasi has already become one of the film’s biggest talking points. The story reportedly spans thousands of years while travelling across multiple locations, including Antarctica, with the ancient city of Varanasi standing at the centre of a dramatic battle involving an asteroid. To match that enormous vision, portions of the film are also being shot on 70mm IMAX film, making it one of the most technically ambitious Indian productions ever attempted.
Sharing an update on filming, Rajamouli revealed that the production has already completed most of its large-scale sequences.
“What I can say is we have completed a major portion of the shoot, all the important big spectacle action sequences are done,” Rajamouli said. “We are [now] into doing the smaller, interconnecting scenes so hopefully, by September, maybe a little bit into October, we should be finishing shooting.”
The filmmaker also explained that choosing the IMAX format never forced the team to redesign the film. Instead, the story itself naturally demanded a larger canvas from the beginning.
“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 said.
Rajamouli admitted the only real adjustment came during the early days of production as the crew adapted to composing scenes for both traditional CinemaScope and IMAX presentation.
“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.”
Baahubali’s World Continues To Grow Through Animation
Even while directing Varanasi, Rajamouli has remained closely involved with the expanding Baahubali franchise. The next chapter, Baahubali: The Eternal War, is being directed by Ishan Shukla and marks one of the franchise’s biggest steps outside live-action cinema. Rather than simply recreating familiar stories, the animated feature aims to explore entirely new corners of the mythology already established across the earlier films.
Rajamouli believes the transition has been smoother because the fictional universe already has years of creative development behind it.
“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 said.
He also explained that once he became confident Ishan Shukla fully understood the characters and the emotional foundation of the franchise, he deliberately stepped back to allow the new creative team to shape the project.
“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.”
According to Rajamouli, animation offers opportunities that live-action filmmaking cannot always achieve on a practical level. The filmmaker said the idea of taking Baahubali into the 14 realms of Indian mythology immediately convinced him that the project had found the right creative direction.
“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 said.
Why Rajamouli Believes Animation And IMAX Are The Future
Rajamouli believes one of Indian storytelling’s biggest strengths lies in its emotional richness and colourful characters rather than visual spectacle alone. According to him, animation makes it easier to fully embrace those qualities while presenting worlds that would otherwise require enormous resources in live-action filmmaking.
“I don’t just mean color [literally], but the characters, the emotions, and how the emotions are played are very colorful,” he explained. “I think that is very unique to India, and I think the audiences… who have already seen ‘Baahubali’ or ‘RRR,’ or whoever got a taste of that, are definitely waiting for more.”
For Rajamouli, emotional storytelling has always come before visual scale.
“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 filmmaker also welcomed the return of IMAX screens to Hyderabad ahead of Varanasi’s release. Rajamouli said Telugu audiences have always embraced cinema from every language and deserved access to premium large-format theatres once again.
“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,” he said.
Looking back at Hyderabad’s famous Prasad IMAX, Rajamouli admitted it had been frustrating watching other cities gain new IMAX screens while Hyderabad lost its iconic venue.
“But finally it is happening, and I’m so happy for it,” he added.
With filming now entering its final stretch and the biggest action sequences already completed, Varanasi continues to shape up as Rajamouli’s most technically ambitious project to date. At the same time, the filmmaker’s confidence in Baahubali: The Eternal War signals that his cinematic universe is preparing to grow well beyond live-action, giving audiences another large-scale Indian fantasy to look forward to before Varanasi arrives in April 2027.
