3 min readHyderabadUpdated: Jun 26, 2026 02:48 PM IST
Actor Prabhas has opened up about just how disorienting life became after Baahubali, revealing in a new behind-the-scenes documentary, Baahubali The Torchbearer, that the film’s scale changed the business of Telugu cinema overnight, and left him struggling to sleep for years as he tried to figure out what to do next.
Reflecting on the ripple effect Baahubali had on his own career, Prabhas pointed to the numbers his next film, Saaho, opened to in North India. “Saaho’s first day collections in the North were around Rs 26 crore,” he said, calling the figure “really shocking” at the time. He was clear about where the credit belonged. “It happened only because of Baahubali. There’s nothing else to it. The opening day for any language was only because of Baahubali,” he said, adding that the budgets for Saaho, the ship sequence in Radhe Shyam, and every film he made afterward were only possible because of the financial freedom Baahubali’s success had unlocked. Before that, he noted, his films typically operated on budgets of 20 to 40 crore.
That same success, however, came with a cost. Prabhas described the period immediately following Baahubali as one of the most stressful stretches of his career, driven by the pressure of choosing a worthy follow up. “What’s next for me? A high-packed drama like Baahubali? Something more visual? But that was Rajamouli,” he said, explaining that the team considered several different directions before settling on anything concrete. “We thought we’d do a screenplay-based film. Then we thought we’d do a love story. There were discussions with Prashanth Neel and Nag Ashwin,” he revealed, naming two directors who would later go on to define very different chapters of his post-Baahubali career.
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He was candid about the toll this indecision took on him personally. “I couldn’t sleep properly for two or three years after Baahubali. The level of responsibility in every department suddenly increased a thousandfold. Those were the most stressful years of my life after Baahubali,” he said. Looking back, he credited that very pressure, and the film that caused it, with eventually leading him toward two of his more recent major releases. “We had the mother, the great Baahubali, which made it possible for us to go on and make Kalki and Salaar. It’s all because Baahubali happened first,” he said.
The conversations he referenced eventually translated into Salaar, directed by Prashanth Neel and released in 2023, and Kalki 2898 AD, directed by Nag Ashwin and released in 2024, both of which became major commercial successes in their own right and reinforced Prabhas’s standing as one of the few Indian actors capable of anchoring big budget, pan-India productions.
