With Bollywood churning out remakes of south movies, Telugu actor Sreenivas Bellamkonda too appears to be making most of the trend. He is set to make his Hindi debut with Chatrapathi, a remake of S S Rajamouli’s 2005 action film of the same name. Tell him that adaptations have more than their share of naysayers, and Bellamkonda offers a different view.

“You need to find content that will excite the audience. To me, Chatrapathi is not a remake. [The makers] are calling it a remake for publicity sake, because the names of Rajamouli and Prabhas work well. But here, I rewrote everything in Hindi; my dialogues have been changed. I have gone through a more elaborate process than for a brand new film,” states the actor, who is joined by Nushrratt Bharuccha in the film.

The past few years have witnessed a rise in the pan-India popularity of south films. With the mammoth success of Telugu offerings Pushpa: The Rule (2021) and RRR (2022), and Kannada biggies like KGF: Chapter 2 (2022), Hindi movies have been pitted against their south counterparts. Bellamkonda, however, despises the demarcation. How does he feel then that Rajamouli called RRR a Telugu film rather than an Indian film at a pre-Oscar event earlier this year?

“It’s better we forget about this north-south divide because we are all Indian cinema lovers. We are one, and should try to make the best cinema possible. I don’t like calling it Hindi or Telugu cinema. If I had gone out, I would have called it Indian cinema. Maybe he felt a certain way; we don’t know what he went through [at that moment].”