41st anniversary of The Times of India, Bengaluru: How Bengaluru turned into a dynamic film capital | Bengaluru News
By: S Shyam PrasadBefore Independence, the Cantonment part of Bengaluru was culturally more English while the rest under the Mysore King was Kannadiga. In the 1980s, this invisible cultural division could still be discerned in big-screen entertainment. While Mahatma Gandhi Road in the erstwhile Cantonment predominantly screened English or Hindi films, Kempe Gowda Road was dominated by Kannada movies. But a big change was brewing from within. The city was set to transform, combining its quaint past with an emerging silicon age.
S Shyam Prasad
After the illustrious ’70s, Kannada films moved on to the Golden ’80s. Matinee idol Rajkumar was at the peak of his popularity and prowess, churning out awesome mythological spectacles, mesmerising social dramas and reaffirming his status as a Kannada cultural icon. It was not uncommon to have three different films of his running to houseful shows in three different theatres on KG Road.
The Bengaluru audience was overwhelmed with excessive options. The ’80s also witnessed Vishnuvardhan’s action films that reinvented a beloved star, Ambareesh’s politically charged flicks that changed the concept of villainy in Indian films, Shankar Nag’s experiments that captured the imagination of the nation, Anant Nag’s comedies, Kashinath’s socially poignant satires, and ‘Tiger’ Prabhakar with his action comedies gave spoilt-for-choice a whole new meaning. Into this burst multifaceted talents like Ravichandran, Shivarajkumar, Hamsalekha, Nagabharana and Sunil Kumar Desai.The second half of the ’80s witnessed a dramatic change in Bengaluru’s film industry. The Kannada film industry, along with the Telugu industry, was based out of Chennai for several decades. While the Telugu industry moved to Hyderabad, the Kannada film industry was the last to move out to its own backyard. Shankar Nag seeded the idea with Sanket Studio in the city. After his untimely death, Hamsalekha took the idea to fruition by recording songs for films in the city for the first time. He introduced local musicians, who were till then confined to private albums, to films. The Kannada film industry moved to Bengaluru completely. Today, Bengaluru is home to more than 250 recording studios.
Bengaluru was a hub of silent-era movies in the early 1930s but lost outafter the arrival of talkie films, where Chennai and Mumbai dominated. After nearly 50 years, the entire process of filmmaking, including shooting, recording, and processing labs, returned to the city in the late 1980s.The new wave of actors and directors who had entered the industry in the late ’80s took centre stage in the 90s. Ravichandran, Shivarajkumar, and Ramesh Aravind led the new wave of entertainers. From the volatile Police Story with its gross dialogues to the classy Beladingala Baale, the variety of the ’80s continued. Audiences were flocking to both kinds of films. The decade also marked the beginning of the “machchu-longu” (sword-machete) films, with Om proving to be the turning point of the film industry. In the following decade, a large majority of films made by newcomers focused on crime and the underworld, the glut of which is sometimes blamed for the aversion to action films the more conservative among the Kannada audience developed. Apart from directing Om, Upendra turned hero with unconventional films like A and Upendra.Another significant change the Kannada film industry witnessed in the ‘90s was the problem of a shortage of local writers. Most of the old guard had abruptly faded, leaving the industry’s next generation of writers ungroomed. This resulted in the unprecedented turn towards remake films. Films from Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu began to be remade without abandon. With the unofficial ban on dubbing into Kannada since the ’60s, Bengaluru had developed pockets where Tamil and Hindi films thrived in their original, especially in the former Cantonment areas. These pockets grew in the ’90s, with Kannada films increasingly depending on remakes. With migration, Telugu films joined the party and suddenly, Bengaluru was the only city with films in five different languages, including English, releasing every week.The new centuryThe turn of the century saw the arrival of three actors who would become superstars: Sudeep, Darshan, andPuneeth Rajkumar. Their stardom (after the untimely death of Puneeth) in Bengaluru and the rest of Karnataka continues to this day. Kannada actresses, including Ramya, Rakshita, and Radhika, were also part of this new generation.In 2003, Bengaluru got its first taste of multiplex cinema. Signalling the growth of the city, the first ‘multiscreen theatres’ came up in Marathahalli rather than the more traditional cinema hubs of KG Road and MG Road. It was followed by the now-standard multiplex screens in Koramangala. This decade saw the steady decline of single-screen theatres in Bengaluru. In the 1990s, there were nearly 200 single screens in the city. Despite the rapid growth of the city since then, no new single screen was added.In September 2014, the 23rd multiplex in Bengaluru with eight screens came up, taking the total number of multiplex screens to 113. The number of single screens had come down to 112 (a few more had ceased operations but still had standing structures). The pendulum had swung.Former Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce president and exhibitor, KV Chandrashekar, said, “Today, in 2025, the number of single screens in the city has reduced to 68 while 58 multiplexes with a combined 285 screens have far overtaken them.” For Karnataka, the numbers are 333 and 458, respectively.Multiplexes also helped languages with smaller demographics to screen films in Bengaluru. Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, and Marathi films began to be regularly screened in the city. Large-scale migration helped Bhojpuri films to be screened in a few single screens as well. However, the earlier ‘MG Road films’ (English and Hindi) completely abandoned single screens and became ‘multiplex-only’ films. Single screens could be filled only by Kannada films with big stars and the bigbudget films from Telugu and Tamil.The big spurtThe late 2010s saw a major explosion of filmmaking in Bengaluru, with the Kannada film industry experiencing an unprecedented spurt in production. From an industry that was churning out around 70–75 films a year, the annual releases breached 200 within the next ten years. This was in no small measure due to the success of Mungaru Male (2006), which set many records, including becoming the first Indian film to run in a multiplex for a full year. The film literally introduced hundreds of new directors, actors, and producers to the industry. The shift from celluloid to digital filming was another factor which aided this rapid growth.Ganesh, Duniya Vijay, Yash, and Rakshit Shetty were some of the stars who emerged during this period. The 2010s and ’20s saw great experimentation as the film industry in Bengaluru tried to crack the multiplex code, which seemed to favour only high-budget films.The way people watched films has also changed. Veteran director and producer SV Rajendra Singh Babu said, “In the ’80s, Rajkumar’s films had the highest number of openings in Bengaluru with 7–8 screens. In the ‘90s, Vishnuvardhan and Ravichandran’s films were released in 12–13 theatres. Now every big film is released in 40plus single screens plus the 50-plus multiplexes. From 10 prints (celluloid) in the ’80s, we now release films in 300plus theatres in Karnataka.”Today, Bengaluru is still the biggest market for Kannada films. Interestingly, it is also a very big market for all other language films. “Last week, we had an Oriya film running houseful shows in Bengaluru. A Tamil film of Rajinikanth will make a business of up to Rs 35 crore. It is not only because people are watching films in all languages but also because Bengaluru has the highest ticket prices anywhere. Hyderabad and Chennai have a cap on ticket prices, but not Bengaluru,” he points out.Discounting the lull of the Covid pandemic, there was a hint of the Bengaluru industry having created a new path with pan-India hits like the KGF series and Kantara. Mirroring the development in other industries, the ‘Pan-India’ phenomenon is the new craze. But insiders are concerned. The Kannada film industry no longer dominates the city.It is now just one of several entertainers. From colonial-era divides to modern-day multiplexes, from silent films to digital releases, Bengaluru’s cinematic landscape has been anything but static. The city has welcomed every kind of film, nurtured multiple generations of talent, and mirrored the cultural shifts of Karnataka itself.Today, even as traditional theatres disappear and new platforms emerge, Bengaluru continues to be one of India’s most dynamic film capitals, a place where the story, no matter the language, is always centrestage.(The writer is a film curator)