Tollywood, which is perenially short on ideas, has now got a new bag of tricks, courtesy the red hot real estate market on the outskirts and the shenanigans of land mafia specialising in settling disputes.
Going by recent trends, heroes no longer meet villains to beat them up for eyeing the heroine. Instead, they go for each other’s throats over a piece of land on the outskirts of Hyderabad.
Many films’ storylines are now being dictated by the developments in the real estate sector. In ‘Bhukailas’ realeased on May 25, comedian Venu Madhav plays a milk vendor who nets a neat Rs 100 crore for his two acre thanks to the outer ring road project. While in ‘Munna’, starring Prabhas which was released in April, the mafia rides piggyback on the real estate boom to make its presence felt.
‘Jagadam’, released in March, has violence as the theme and it is the huge money in real estate that provides the reason. Though another Prabhas-starrer ‘Yogi’ released in January this year is about a motherson relationship, the villains are again men running the land mafia.
In Mahesh Babu’s big hit ‘Pokiri’, released in April last year, director Puri Jagannath portrayed how ruthlessly gangsters kill for land around Hyderabad. Just as a special team of the Cyberabad police allegedly killed in an encounter an extortionist from the land mafia, Mahesh Babu — an undercover police officer — goes around eliminating such gangsters.
“The real estate boom and the land mafia have become an integral part of several films in the recent past. Land is the cause of rivalries between gangs in films,” says film critic Jeevi. “It is not just in films that the real estate boom in Hyderabad is manifest. What we are observing is that a number of people who have made huge money in real estate are turning film producers. They want the tag ‘film producer’ and seek to rub shoulders with heroes and heroines,” a wellknown film producer said on condition of anonymity.
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