There are two kinds of movies generally according to audience taste – class and mass. Apart from this, there are offbeat films which are completely different. Telugu films have always earned the tag of not being up to mark most of the time for a long time since content based films were not churned to a large extent.
Before the 90s, Telugu was known for amazing movies which were focused on content and many had won national awards too. However, the rise of young stars in the late 80s took the industry on a different gear where mass became the king and almost entire 90s and the first decade of 2000 was completely based on mass films with hardly a few films focused on content. Tollywood was widely criticized and hence Tamil films easily grabbed the fascination of the country with Shankar and Mani Ratnam delivering pan India hits.
However, these days post Baahubali, the entire country has started looking towards Tollywood with a great respect and admiration for content-based flicks. Finally, a good beginning was registered. Telugu films were on fire in all languages on both OTT and large screen. The recent success of mass flicks like Dhamaka, Waltair Veerayya and Veerasimha Reddy is good news for the industry. However, in the long term this may again kick start the old trend of routine mass films and making them and throwing them on the audience.
This was one big mistake many of our top actors made and now there is a possibility that they may repeat again with the back to back success of mass films and good content films may be restricted to OTT. At a time when Telugu movies are awakening our cultural spirit, it is not wise to simply blindly revive mass mania and it is very important to balance between pure mass flicks and content based projects.
