Rajamouli Confirms Major Varanasi Shoot Is Complete

The filmmaker revealed that a major portion of the shoot has already been completed, including all the big spectacle action sequences.

The team is now working on smaller connecting scenes, and Rajamouli hopes to wrap up the shoot by September or early October.

“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 in an interview with Variety.

That one line has now become the biggest talking point around the film.

Varanasi, starring Mahesh Babu and Priyanka Chopra, is already being described as Rajamouli’s most ambitious film yet.

The story is reportedly set across thousands of years and multiple locations, including Antarctica, with the holy city of Varanasi facing an asteroid threat.

The film is also being partly shot on 70mm IMAX film, making it one of the biggest visual experiments in Indian cinema.

Rajamouli said the film was not changed just to suit the IMAX format.

According to him, the sequences were designed in such a grand way from the beginning that IMAX naturally became the right choice.

He admitted that framing scenes for both IMAX and regular CinemaScope took some adjustment in the first few days, but the team soon found its rhythm.

While Varanasi is moving forward at full speed, Rajamouli is also involved with Baahubali: The Eternal War, the animated expansion of the Baahubali universe.

The project is directed by Ishan Shukla and aims to take the franchise into a much bigger mythological space.

Rajamouli said the world of Baahubali is already well developed, which makes it easier to expand. Once he was convinced that Ishan understood the characters and the spirit of the franchise, he stepped back and allowed the team to take charge.

The director also strongly believes that animation is the right medium to take Baahubali to the next level.

According to him, Indian stories are full of colour, emotion and scale, and animation allows those elements to be explored more freely than live action.

Rajamouli said emotion is always the seed of spectacle in his cinema. For him, the big visual moments are not separate from emotion; they grow out of it.

Meanwhile, Varanasi is also expected to get a major boost from the return of IMAX to Hyderabad.

Rajamouli said it was high time Hyderabad had an IMAX theatre again, adding that Telugu audiences are among the biggest film lovers in the world.

He recalled that Hyderabad once had one of the best IMAX 70mm projectors at Prasads IMAX, but the city lost that advantage after IMAX moved into the digital era.

Now, with Varanasi aiming for a 2027 release and IMAX returning to Hyderabad, the timing could not be better.

Rajamouli has already conquered India and shocked the world with Baahubali and RRR. With Varanasi, he seems ready to push Indian cinema into an even bigger, wilder and more global zone.

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