S.S. Rajamouli is widely known as the biggest director in Indian cinema right now, but since the success of RRR he’s become a global sensation. Between its theatrical release, the record number of viewers who watched it with a Netflix subscription and its Oscar win, the filmmaker is going even bigger with his next movie, Varanasi. Some advice from James Cameron influenced him to go there.
When CinemaBlend had the chance to speak to Rajamouli back in November in Hyderabad, India, the director recalled linking up with the Avatar: Fire And Ash filmmaker while on the Oscar trail for RRR. In his words:
I have seen his clips talking about RRR again, and it made me happy once again. We had a long conversation on RRR, and the words that I remember most is like ‘You continue doing the films the way you do.’ That's the one thing I remember from him. It's a great compliment. I thank him again for that. I'm going in my own way about getting visuals on screen, IMAX being one of them.
There’s a viral clip of the moment when Rajamouli and Cameron linked up at the Critics Choice Awards in 2023 where the directors geeked out over each other. Rajamouli at the time told me he hadn’t spoken to Cameron recently (he later reunited with him for a chat in December shared on YouTube), but his advice has remained important to him as he makes Varanasi.
The new movie, which is coming to global cinemas in April 2027, is currently in production. During my trip to India, Rajamouli unveiled the first footage to Varanasi in front of over 40,000 fans on a massive 100 by 132 foot screen that showcased the visuals being created especially for IMAX. The director told me this about his decision to shoot the adventurous epic:
Once we started writing the script as the details started emerging, we realized we needed something bigger to encompass these visuals apart from all the existing technologies that we used before. Obviously, the first thing that came to our mind was IMAX. Not the 1:1.9, we wanted one to 1:1.4, the big 3:4 large screen. That is because, as shown in the glimpse, the worlds are huge. Let it be Antarctica, let it be Africa, on top of that. Let it be the Rama episode from the Ramayana where you see the Jains who are 125 feet tall. To encompass all these things, to do justice for them, we needed IMAX.
Varanasi is a globetrotting, time-spanning action-adventure film that brings Priyanka Chopra Jonas to Indian cinema for the first time in years since in the past decade, she’s predominantly been producing and starring in Hollywood movies. She joins two other big stars from India, Mahesh Babu and Prithviraj Sukumaran. The title is named after the city of Varanasi, which is thought of as a spiritual capital of India. It’s one of the most expensive movies ever made in India, and one of the first made for IMAX. You can check out the first look at Varanasi here:
This certainly looks like the kind of movie you want to see on the biggest screen possible! As Sukumaran also told us, currently India doesn’t even have a screen that can play a film in the 1.43 ratio, but they hope that will change by the time it comes out. Rajamouli making waves in cinema and thinking big and innovative as he is certainly makes it clear as to why him and James Cameron get along. Varanasi is hitting theaters around the world on April 7, 2027.
