“Pan Indian” is a fairly new phrase that entered the daily lexicon of the Indian movie enthusiast about 10 years ago. It all started in 2015 with the release of director S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Beginning, the first of a two-part historical fantasy that originally was made in the Telugu language, which is spoken in the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in south India. The film was an instant hit and by the end of its run had become the second-highest-grossing Indian movie of all time, taking in $80 million at the domestic box office.

Until Baahubali: The Beginning, there was no need for a film to be called “pan-Indian,” since it was assumed that only the Hindi film industry — or Bollywood, as it came to be known outside of India — could produce a film that would be watched across the length and breadth of this culturally and linguistically diverse country.

For context, Telugu is only the fourth most widely spoken language in India, after Hindi, Bengali and Marathi. Hindi is spoken by 520 million people, while only 81 million speak Telugu. Yet it took the nationwide success of a Telugu movie for a term as generic and all-encompassing as “pan-Indian” to become a part of popular culture.

This phrase can roughly be defined as descriptive of a product that is designed to cater to a viewer from almost every demographic of India, a country with as many as 22 official languages, 2,000 dialects and 1.4 billion people.

India also is the largest producer of feature films in the world, with an average production of 1,500 to 2,000 films a year. The Hindi film industry is just one of eight major film-producing industries of India, with films being made in such other languages as Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi. While the Hindi film industry produces as many as 300 films a year, the Telugu film industry produces an average of 200 to 250 films every year.

But with the release of Baahubali, there was a strategy — and luck — that went into creating the first pan-Indian movie. It was the first Telugu film to get a simultaneous release across the world on as many as 4,000 screens. To pull this off, the film’s producers, Arka Media Works, partnered with some of the biggest distributors of each region for a Hindi dubbed version. All this for a film that featured no recognizable stars for the Hindi viewer and a budget that was ballooning toward $28 million.

“In hindsight, it’s not easy to explain the magnitude of the risk we were taking,” says Baahubali‘s producer, Shobu Yarlagadda of Arka Media Works. “Months into production, we knew the budgets were going to be so high that we needed the film to work beyond the Telugu-speaking audience to recover shooting costs. But we were unsure if the Hindi audiences would come to the theater to watch a movie with a cast they did not recognize.”

Apart from the marketing and the powerful distributors Team Baahubali had chosen partner with, they also planned for the Hindi dub a year before the film’s release. “It wasn’t an afterthought like how other Telugu movies were getting dubbed back then,” adds Yarlagadda.

Two years later, the film’s sequel, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, collected $25.16 million on its first day of release, a record it held on to for five years until Rajamouli’s next film, the global phenomenon RRR, overtook it in 2022. Its impact was, naturally, wider than box office numbers alone.

Thanks to the Baahubali films, the power dynamics began to shift from the big production studios in Mumbai — the home of the Bollywood industry — to those that operate out of Hyderabad, where Telugu is the primary language. According to media consulting firm Ormax, in 2019 Hindi releases sold 341 million tickets, but by 2022 that number had plummeted to 189 million. Over the same period, Telugu films went from 182 million tickets sold to 233 million.

“The total number of people who watched last year’s Pushpa 2: The Rule in Telugu was around 20 million,” says Mukesh Manjunath, a Telugu film critic and author based out of Telangana. “This year’s biggest Hindi film, Chhaava, was watched by around 25 million to 30 million people. But when you add the numbers of people who watched Pushpa 2 in both the Hindi and Telugu versions, that’s when you end up with a true pan-Indian film.” Chhaava ended its run with a total of 28 million admissions, much less than the 63 million people said to have watched Pushpa 2: The Rule in all of its versions.

In addition to increased Hindi dubbing and wider releases, another trend was beginning to emerge a decade ago: Bollywood was becoming a victim of its own success, and class was becoming a key factor. Vishek Chauhan is the CEO of a chain of movie theaters called Roopbani Cinemas located in India’s eastern state of Bihar, where Bhojpuri is the most widely spoken language. Bihar also is among the poorest states in India, with the majority of the population living in rural spaces. Chauhan says Bollywood productions began to frequently be made with primarily an urban audience in mind, ignoring the everyday reality of rural moviegoers who, he says, were turned off by Hindi movies that attempted to mimic Hollywood productions.

“You see that Hollywood sensibility popping out of big-budget Hindi films getting made even today,” says Manjunath. “If you see [the 2023 Bollywood release] Pathaan, you can see how it’s attempting to create an Indian-ized Mission: Impossible with the idea of a globe-trotting superspy. But the Telugu movie that works across the country is still rooted in Indian emotions and mythology. They are not trying to imitate Hollywood.”

Following Baahubali, Telugu releases were steadily becoming the cinema of the people, but a major factor behind this shift was the ability for rural populations to watch movies online. Before Baahubali drew Hindi-speaking viewers into theaters for a Telugu movie, millions across India were watching Telugu films dubbed into Hindi on what has now become the world’s biggest YouTube channel dedicated to streaming feature films: Goldmines Telefilms, the brainchild of an entrepreneur named Manish Shah. Shah founded the YouTube channel in the mid-2000s, and it is now the world’s 10th biggest channel, with more than 100 million subscribers and annual revenue of roughly $47 million.

According to Shah, it was the viewers used to watching Telugu films in Hindi either on their television or phones who comprised the theater-going audience when Baahubali was released. “The audience was just waiting for that one film to be attractive enough to make them want to go to the cinemas,” he says. “They did that with Baahubali and haven’t gone back since.”

Adds Manjunath: “Until a decade ago, Telugu cinema was dismissed for its crude presentation or its over-the-top action sequences that were deemed too unrealistic. It has always been escapist entertainment, but it also never deviated from the emotions that appeal to the common man.”

The rise of Telugu cinema may have coincided with a particularly low point for Hindi movie production, but Chauhan is quick to note that the Bollywood of today is in a period of transition.

“The problem today is that Hindi production houses are making films that 90 percent of India’s backyard do not want to watch,” he says. “We’re looking forward to a phase in which south Indian directors from the Telugu or Tamil movie industries will make Hindi films with Hindi stars. Either way, thanks to Telugu cinema, it looks like all the industries in India will soon merge into one.”

This story appeared in the May 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.