UAE billionaire is funding India's most expensive film of all time
That India is the world's most prolific film-producing nation is well-known.
It makes over 2,000 films in more than 10 languages every year — a feat unmatched elsewhere in the world. And grand dreams require grand budgets.
One such is The Mahabharata, a multi-lingual retelling of the Sanskrit epic, that will be the costliest Indian movie ever made.
UAE-based billionaire B.R. Shetty will reportedly be putting in $150 million in the production of The Mahabharata. That is five times the budget of Baahubali (2015) — India's most expensive movie thus far — that became a gigantic success across the globe.
The Mahabharata will be shot in multiple Indian languages and later dubbed in leading foreign languages too.
It promises to bring together "the creme de la creme of Indian and global cinema" and also ensure "the film has an identity across continents". Shetty reckons that film would reach 3 billion people — that's a little less than half the world's population.
That's quite ambitious.
Since 'Mahabharata' is an epic, literally, one telling might not do justice to the subject. Hence, the film will be produced in two parts and is scheduled to go on floors by September 2018 for a release in early 2020.
The second part will be released within 90 days of the first.
We're waiting!
