Telugu cinema 2022: The year that was and 10 films worth recommending

‘RRR’ to ‘Masooda’, ‘Sita Ramam’ to ‘Major’, ‘Ante Sundaraniki’ and ‘HIT 2’ to ‘Oke Oka Jeevitham’ and ‘DJ Tillu’, Telugu cinema offered both tentpole movies and small wonders in 2022 

2022 was the year when S S Rajamouli’s Telugu movie RRR soared to international acclaim; with the film bagging nominations for coveted international awards, its popularity shows no signs of slowing down. It was also the year when a few Telugu films made with much smaller budgets — the wacky crime comedy DJ Tillu, the time travel family drama Oke Oka Jeevitham and the horror film Masooda — enjoyed patronage.  

Data available from the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce suggests that more than 212 Telugu films and 57 dubbed films released in theatres. Among them, only 20 to 25 have been box office successes. 

Before recommending 10 films from the year, here is an overview:

At the start of the year, director Sukumar and Allu Arjun’s mid-December 2021 rustic gangster drama Pushpa -The Rise was still running to packed halls. It looked as though the pandemic-induced lull was a thing of the past, but the Omicron wave took over briefly from mid January. It was a tepid Sankranti at the movies barring Bangarraju. 

Pan-India cinema was the buzzword, albeit overused, in the months that followed. RRR and KGF - Chapter Two (Kannada and Telugu dub versions) ruled the box office in the Telugu states. Sensing the enthusiasm among the audience for larger-than-life spectacles, ticket prices were raised with the nod of the Telangana and Andhra Pradesh state governments. This, in turn, made viewers weigh their choices carefully before venturing into cinema halls. Many OTT-habituated viewers preferred to wait till new releases found their way to digital platforms in a few weeks.

Radhe Shyam and Acharya proved that not every big film with an A-list star would work at the box office. The heavily-publicised Liger also joined this list, reiterating that the audiences cannot be taken for granted.

A film that was not promoted as a pan-India project, to begin with, but caught on swiftly, was director Chandoo Mondeti’s Karthikeya 2, backed by the producers of The Kashmir Files. The film had the potential to be a Da Vinci Code in an Indian context exploring Hindu semiotics, gained from the current socio-political mood and went on to be a hit in Telugu and Hindi.