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“The business model works because of accountability. If we give the hero dates, they just sit back, and if the director agrees, that’s it,” Ram Gopal Varmasaid, describing the Telugu industry’s approach. “Just spending hundreds of crores on a fancy video and taking three or four years doesn’t guarantee a good movie.”

He said Bollywood was not always this disciplined. The shift, he argued, was forced by failure. “Bollywood, especially when it comes to accountability and discipline, has started following many processes only in the last two or three years, post-COVID,” Ram Gopal Varma said. “Before that, it was mostly all flops for years, and South Indian cinema basically took over Indian films. That’s even been covered in national media.”

The corporate model that now governs Bollywood, Ram Gopal Varma explained, works on a simple principle: the budget is the budget, and anything beyond it is the director’s problem. “Whatever budget they set, that’s the natural max,” he said. “Whatever you take beyond that, you have to keep it from your own pocket.”

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He said this kind of system would never work in Telugu cinema as it stands today because independent producers do not have the authority or the willingness to enforce such limits. In Bollywood, he said, the corporate structure ensures that someone is always answerable for the numbers. “They need to see the balance sheet. How much you made and why. It’s all about accountability,” he said.

Ram Gopal Varma also pointed out that the consequences of failure are distributed very differently in the two industries. In Bollywood, where corporate companies are publicly listed, the losses from a flop are absorbed across the business and never fall on one individual. “Whatever failure happens here, no one really suffers from it because these are corporate companies, and they’re public. The losses get spread out,” he said. “You never hear about who actually takes the loss, in Hindi cinema or Hollywood, because the risk gets shared around.”

In Telugu cinema, by contrast, the independent producer bears the entire loss, often without having had any real control over the spending that caused it. That imbalance, Ram Gopal Varma argued, is the core reason the Telugu industry keeps cycling through financial crises while Bollywood, for all its creative limitations, has managed to stabilise its cost structures.