Owing to the moviegoer’s increasingly short attention spans and the newest tendency of paying heed to the audience’s feedback, the Tollywood films face a serious threat of getting chopped off after its release. Most recently Prabhas-starrer Rebel had to be shortened by 15 minutes soon after the release and Sekhar Kammula’s Life is Beautiful was trimmed by about 8-10 minutes. Even the Debutante director Hanu Raghavapudi’s Andala Rakshasi had to endure a similar fate.
And it’s not just the length of the movie that is facing the brunt of this recent trend. It has emerged that occasionally films dubbed from other languages are even edited to construct alternative endings as well as some major changes in characterization. Director Hanu Raghavapudi explains, “Sometimes, as filmmakers, we tend to get a little too attached to a few scenes and we end up looking at things from a storytelling point of view. So, the opening scene may have been important from that standpoint, but we realised that a major section of the audiences were finding it a little too depressing.
