Prabhas fans have had a rough week for release-date news, and Fauzi isn't helping. The Hanu Raghavapudi-directed period actioner, currently pegged for December 3, is now the subject of persistent Tollywood trade chatter suggesting it slides to January 2027 instead. Nobody attached to the film has confirmed this. But the buzz has been loud enough that it's now a standing joke in fan circles, right up there with Paradise's own scheduling headaches.

What's actually confirmed comes from an unlikely corner: Jitin Gulati, the Hindi actor known for MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, has spoken about his two years on the Fauzi set. In a chat with Variety, Gulati called Prabhas "a very generous man and a good human being," adding that the Baahubali star is "always there," "the sweetest," and someone he's personally watched help people around him through the shoot. Fauzi is Gulati's first major Tollywood-led project, and by his account, it's been a long haul, not a quick cameo run.

That two-year shoot timeline matters here. Fauzi has assembled a genuinely unusual cast for a Telugu tentpole. Mithun Chakraborty and Anupam Kher reportedly have substantial parts, not walk-ons, and Jaya Prada, a name Telugu audiences remember from decades of pairing with the industry's biggest heroes, is also on board. Gulati joins that Hindi-heavy roster working under a Tollywood director on what's being pitched as a multi-lingual release. That's a lot of moving parts for a film set in the 1940s, or thereabouts, with what producer Y Ravi Shankar has described as an action drama carrying a "philosophical and layered" spine underneath.

Ravi Shankar has also been talking up Prabhas's character as a deliberate surprise, saying fans should expect him to "shock and stun audiences with his performance and commanding screen presence." Fine words. But surprise casting and philosophical undercurrents don't mean much to distributors staring down a possible date shift with less than three months to go before the announced release.

The bigger scheduling picture

Prabhas isn't exactly short on things to finish. He's simultaneously attached to Spirit and Kalki 2, both of which eat into calendar space that Fauzi would otherwise have to itself. A push to January 2027 would give the team breathing room, and honestly, multi-lingual period dramas with this many moving cast pieces rarely benefit from being rushed to hit an arbitrary Friday.

Still, none of this is official. The makers haven't put out a statement confirming or denying the December 3 date, and until they do, everything beyond Gulati's quotes remains trade speculation dressed up as near-certainty. What happens over the next few weeks, whether the makers lock a date publicly or let the rumour mill keep running, will tell us a lot more than another co-star soundbite ever could.