"The Mahabharata has the potential to shake the world, but sadly we don’t have any Hollywood level structure or production to do justice to such a great epic." An X user recently sparked a debate by writing this. This is a sad fact of life, considering that our budgets are now Hollywood-level. Ranbir Kapoor-Sai Pallavi's Ramayana movies (two) have been made on a budget of Rs 4000 Cr (at least, that's the stated number). This figure is higher than that of The Odyssey. So, what is stopping us from making a grand Mahabharata-based movie? That's a debate for another day. Social media users have touched upon various aspects of the debate.
Shaatri Banda: As opposed to Ramayan's linear ideal story, Mahabharata is a complex web of wars, doubtable morality, political chess match, multi generational thrillers, etc.
Akshay Parvatkar: The Indian audience is not ready for the complexity of Mahabharata. All the popular versions are highly sanitised, upper caste friendly, family friendly, patriarchal versions of the epic. Get into nuances and you will find people taking offence left, right and center.
Tarun Raju: The Mahabharata won't work as a feature film, it needs to be at least a 12-episode mini series. Hindu epics are not about the events but the processes leading up to the events. Their essence will be lost to cinematic editing.
Veritas: Use a modern animation style like the one in Baahubali: The Eternal War or the Sony Spider-Verse and make it a multi season animated series which covers the entire epic in detail. The next gen audience can connect really well with the animated story if done right. Release it worldwide in all major languages and market it well to position it as a global phenomenon. If Indian media houses don't do it, someone in the West will probably do it once they run out of stories to tell.
Yug Yadav: One reason I despise our filmmakers touching Itihasa, Puranic stories is because they do too little research, happy on surface level knowledge. Their entire focus is cast, songs, marketing, revenue not the story as it's mere cash grab on emotions.
