'Tagore', the 2003 Chiranjeevi-starrer, was a remake. In its original version, 'Ramana' (Tamil), the male lead has no girlfriend, no songs and is hanged to death in the climax. When Chiru proposed to AR Murugadoss to direct the Telugu remake as well, the director told him it would be disastrous commercially if the remake had no songs and the climax is tragic.
In an old interview, Chiru said that the span of Telugu movies has always been too large to warrant offbeat themes and experimental genres. "The budget of Telugu movies has been next only to that of Bollywood. The scale of our movies is huge. That's why I have restrained myself from doing experiments. After a commercial blockbuster like 'Khaidi' in the 1980s, I could do offbeat films like 'Rudraveena' and 'Apathbandhavudu'. But such a scenario doesn't prevail now," Chiru said.
The same logic is why Balakrishna, Venkatesh and Nagarjuna have avoided offbeat films. The same logic is why Pawan Kalyan, Mahesh Babu, Prabhas, Allu Arjun, Jr NTR and Ram Charan have stayed away from anything other than commercial cinema.
