The IMAX shoot for Rajamouli's next big swing, starring Mahesh Babu and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, is already underway as he marks 25 years behind the camera.
Twenty-five years after Student No. 1 hit screens, SS Rajamouli's next film has a release date. Varanasi, starring Mahesh Babu and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, is scheduled to open on April 7, 2027, and it's being shot in IMAX, according to 123telugu.
That's a full year and a half away, which tells you something about the scale Rajamouli's chasing this time. This is a director who doesn't repeat himself in size, only in ambition. Student No. 1 was a small college drama. Twenty-five years later he's shooting on a format usually reserved for Nolan and superhero tentpoles.
The road here has been anything but linear. Rajamouli built his name through the 2000s on films like Simhadri, Chatrapathi and Vikramarkudu, solid commercial cinema that made him a name in Telugu but not yet a name outside it. Magadheera changed that conversation. Then came Eega, a revenge drama told from the perspective of a housefly, which had no business working as well as it did and became proof that his storytelling didn't need a star vehicle to land.
Baahubali is where the scale argument was settled for good. Two films, a mythology built from scratch, and a Telugu franchise that Indian audiences outside the south actually queued up for. RRR pushed that further, turning Ram Charan and Jr NTR into a global pairing and picking up an Oscar for Naatu Naatu along the way, the first for an Indian film in that category.
Varanasi is being positioned, per 123telugu's reporting, as the film where Rajamouli finally chases his biggest dream. What that dream actually looks like on screen, nobody outside the production has said. No plot details, no confirmation of genre, nothing beyond the cast and the IMAX format have been made public yet.
What's notable is the pairing itself. Mahesh Babu hasn't worked with Rajamouli before, and this would be Priyanka Chopra Jonas's first major Telugu production at this scale. Two very different star ecosystems, Hollywood-adjacent international appeal meeting Telugu cinema's biggest current commercial name, under a director whose last film won at the Oscars.
April 7, 2027 gives the production a long runway, and IMAX shoots don't move fast anyway. Expect the drip of details, first-look posters, a teaser, maybe a title reveal event, to stretch out over the next year. For now, the date is the news. Everything else about Varanasi stays locked down.
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