Last year, They Call Him OG had everyone behaving like it was some masterpiece. All that it had was bloody action, hyper-stylized swag and Pawan Kalyan's aura. Thaman's copycat music added to the enormous buzz. The film, despite a run-of-the-mill story, grossed nearly Rs 300 Cr. They are now doing a sequel.
Cut to the present. The Paradise managing to get a bumper opening and continuing to hold well despite a majority of the online audience disliking the movie to the core is the final nail in the coffin of Tollywood creativity. From now on, every two-bit filmmaker is going to depend only on GIMMICKS.
In its first two days, the Nani-Srikanth Odela movie grossed Rs 100 Cr worldwide. As per trade reports, it continues to do reasonably well in Nizam territory over the weekend. This is a seriously extraordinary performance by a dumb Tier-2 hero movie.
The Paradise is a one-trick pony. And the trick's name is Anirudh's Aaya Sher and Yeshanagula. If you take out these two songs and the one accompanying rousing score, the film is nuts. All that you have in the movie are Boyapati Sreenu's 'paithyam'-level ideas mixed with the borrowed grittiness of a dummy version of Prashanth Neel. The film offers an unhinged idea/scene every ten minutes.
If, despite the obvious blunders, The Paradise is ending its theatrical run with a Rs 130 Cr gross (or even more), it's truly OVER for Telugu cinema. It's evident that the audience now look for one great song and a few gimmicky scenes. Rape a few female characters, torture a couple of pregnant women/teen girls and they will watch any random nonsense you make.
Every major actor on whom a producer can invest Rs 100 Cr is going to do ultra-violent, mindless action movies set in a bygone era in which world-building is about Anirudh Ravichander dishing out an English song.
Sujeeth after OG and Odela after The Paradise have buried imagination and aesthetics. And they have the support of a young cinema-crazy population that wants nothing less than loudness and style. It's truly OVER! The movies of almost all major stars are going to be about GIMMICKS.
