Director Shankar is branded as the successful commercial filmmaker in Indian cinema. However, he is out of form in the last ten years. Practically, after Robo, Shankar failed to woo the audiences with his subsequent films. He is currently coming up with a straight Telugu film, Game Changer. The scenario looks like Shankar might pause his career in Kollywood and focus on Telugu cinema.
Shankar is always the most wanted director in the film industry. Even today, the stars want to work with him and the producers would be ready with advances.
During his prime, many Tollywood stars, including Megastar Chiranjeevi, sought to collaborate with him. Chiranjeevi himself revealed at the audio launch of Robo that he had attempted to work with Shankar, but the project never materialized.
During the pre-release event of Game Changer, Shankar reflected on his delayed directorial debut in Telugu. He shared that he had made significant efforts in the past to collaborate with Telugu superstars. He mentioned discussions with Chiranjeevi that didn’t come to fruition, attempts to work with Mahesh Babu, and even serious talks with Prabhas during the pandemic. Despite these efforts, none of those projects took off.
However now, Shankar might seriously focus on continuing to collaborate with stars from Telugu cinema. If Game Changer becomes a blockbuster, by default, it opens a lot of doors for Shankar. In one of the earlier interviews, Shankar opened up that he would not be willing to do a film on a less budget and he wants to explore bigger spans and mount his films on massive scales. So, there is no chance that he would settle down with a tier-2 or tier-3 hero.
In Tamil, among the tier-1 heroes, Kamal Haasan already did Indian 2 and Indian 3 recently with Shankar. Rajinikanth already has a big line up of movies. Vijay is quitting the films and Ajith is only choice for Shankar. Vikram might not be looking at working with Shankar at the moment while Suriya and Karthi are also occupied.
To immediately start a film, Shankar will have a lot of options from Telugu, provided he has a blockbuster in hand, with Game Changer.
