We are all singing praises about ‘Baahubali’ now and claiming it as the first pan-Indian film but a lot of filmmakers have tried to make pan-Indian projects long before Rajamouli arrived. A lot of youngsters may be shocked but let us talk about one such film that ended as an epic disaster. Kannada star hero Ravichandran came up with a movie back in 1988.
The film’s name is ‘Shanti Kranti’ and it is about people who are disguised as Babas and do business with the bodies of orphan kids. They planned to make this film in four languages with three heroes. They even allotted a huge budget for this film despite the Kannada market being very limited at that point in time.
Ravichandran who scored an industry hit with ‘Prema Loka’ at that point and delivered another blockbuster like ‘Ranadheera’ had a lot of money at his disposal. His father Veeraswamy was a renowned distributor and producer. Due to this, he readied a script for his big project. After ‘Shiva’, Nagarjuna who is on the look out for interesting roles found this script very interesting. It is a police officer role and the opening ceremony was held grandly in Bengaluru. Ravichandran is the hero in Kannada while Nagarjuna and Rajnikanth are the lead actors in Telugu and Tamil respectively. They shot each scene four times with different heroes.
But ‘Shanti Kranti’ crossed the budget limit and failed to get completed on time. With no money left, the shooting came to a halt. Rajni and Nag have given their dates without any questions and Anant Nag played the villain role in this film which became a huge topic of discussion at that time. Right when Ravichandran is about to shelve the project, his father who is bedridden has called his son and asked him to complete the project at all costs because two heroes believed in him and gave him dates. He advised him to not keep any doubts and complete the film.
When Ravichandran was looking for financial help, he decided to remake the Tamil hit ‘Chinna Thambi’ upon the advice of her co-star Khushbu. Named ‘Ramachari’, this movie became a super hit and it was remade as ‘Chanti’ in Telugu with Venkatesh as the lead. The debts of Ravichandran got cleared at that time and he got the money required to complete the shooting of ‘Shanti Kranti’. It was completed at last and got released in September of 1991. The movie got a unanimous disaster talk and the buyers ended up in huge losses. Unnecessary songs and over drama irritated the audience and this movie failed to recover one-fourth of its budget. Ravichandran took another 5-6 years to recover from that project.
