Tollywood superstar Prabhas today celebrates his birthday. Known as the Rebel star or Baahubali, Prabhas' journey in the Southern film industry has its peaks and falls, but he has maintained his stardom all through his career of two decades.
Undoubtedly, Baahubali was the highest point in his career. Both the movies from this SS Rajamouli-helmed series were pan-India and global hits giving all its actors including Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, and Anushka Shetty worldwide recognition and following.
Prabhas benefitted the most with Baahubali
Prabhas who played the titular role in the movie benefitted the most from the stupendous success of this film. The charisma of the actor as the powerful heir of Mahishmati mesmerized the audience and they simply fell in love with this look and attitude of Prabhas. Nevertheless, it was the vision and perfect execution of Rajamouli that was instrumental in making this character of Prabhas so impactful.
For Prabhas Baahubali was a boon. It gave him a taste of what ruling the hearts of pan-Indian audiences means. He gave 5 years of his career to Baahubali to ensure that nothing distracts him from making his role in Baahubali memorable. And the efforts paid.
Success turned into a bane as Prabhas failed to repeat the same feat
Before Baahubali, only the Southern audience was interested in Prabhas and went to watch his movies. So even though most of these movies performed well at the box office, one or two flops or mediocre performances could not affect his stardom. But after Baahubali, the expectations of both Prabhas and the audience escalated.
The audience expected him to deliver yet another big hit like Baahubali, Prabhas was also eager to taste the same level of success. However, he failed to repeat the feat. His Sahoo with Shraddha Kapoor was made with an Indian audience in mind but could not do any magic. Radhe Shyam with Pooja Hegde was a big flop and Prabhas was even slammed for his Hindi accent.
Prabhas has been on a signing spree and has multiple projects in hand with big directors. He is doing Adipurush with Tanhaji fame director Om Raut, Project K with Nag Ashwin which also has Bollywood biggies like Deepika Padukone and Amitabh Bachchan, and Salaar with KGF fame director Prashanth Neel.
The teaser of Adipurush released some time ago was slammed badly by the audience and the hopes for its success have diminished considerably. Die-hard Prabhas fans want him to bounce back with a big hit like Baahubali and now all the eyes are set on how Salaar and Project K deliver.
Apart from good directors and star cast, Prabhas now certainly needs a lot of good luck to not only deliver a big hit but also to save his stardom which seems to be on the decline.