Now, everyone has been heaping praises on Baahubali the trendsetter for Pan India movies, but not many knew that the Pan India trend started more than 30 years ago. Kannada superstar Ravichandran who is synonymous with big canvas stories thought of making the biggest budget Pan India movie in 1988 and readied the script.
During his peak, Ravichandran had the aura of a perfect all-rounder. He was a hero, director, and even producer. Churning out movies under his home banner Sri Eswari Productions, N Veeraswamy, Ravichandran never bothered about the budget and wanted a quality output.
He developed a story about fake babas, the drug mafia, and human trafficking and wanted to release it in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi languages. As the Kannada industry was too small back then, he opted to shoot in all languages separately rather than dubbing.
He was the hero in the Kannada version and Nagarjuna who was high after the massive success of Shiva accepted the movie outright. Nagarjuna was picked as the hero for the Telugu version and Rajinikanth for the Tamil and Hindi versions. Juhi Chawla played the heroine for all four versions. The movie was titled Shanti Kranthi.
The movie started with a bang and the budget went overboard, all his savings dried up. Ravichandran realized the movie’s fate in the middle of the shoot, but his father insisted he complete the movie at any cost.
He halted the shoot for some time and bought the remake rights of the super hit Tamil movie Chinna Tambi and released it in Kannada and it went on to become a sensational blockbuster. With the movie earning him huge profits, Ravichandran completed the shooting of the Shanti Kranti movie. The movie which was released in September 1991 ended up as a big disaster in all languages.