Actor Tamannaah Bhatia’s popular love song from the Baahubali franchise will not be included in Baahubali: The Epic, a film which combines both parts of the series. The news sparked a wave of reactions across social media. Now, filmmaker SS Rajamouli has addressed the decision, explaining the reasoning behind the song’s omission.

Rajamouli on Tamannaah Bhatia’s deleted song

In a promotional chat with Prabhas and Rana Daggubati, SS Rajamouli revealed that many scenes did not make it into the new version, and shared the reason behind it.

“By merging both parts and removing the rolling titles, the total duration would have been around five hours and 27 minutes. The current version, however, runs for three hours and 43 minutes. Major portions that were removed include Avanthika’s love story with Shivudu, the songs Pacha Bottesina, Kanna Nidurinchara, and Irrukupo. Several sequences from the war episodes have also been trimmed,” Rajamouli said.

Talking about the thought behind it, he added, “Every scene in Baahubali carries emotional weight and narrative importance, but we wanted the new version to be purely story-driven. The first cut was about four hours and ten minutes long. We held a special screening for both cinema and non-cinema audiences from different backgrounds, took their feedback, and then reduced it to three hours and 43 minutes.”

He confessed that he came up with the idea of combining the two films together five years ago with an intention to “see if the story could be told as a single film”. The director admitted that he tried a linear narration but it didn’t work. Then they decided to shorten the scene lengths, but that didn’t work either. That’s when they finally decided to remove episodes.

Meanwhile, in a recent chat with Filmfare, Tamannaah was asked what the Baahubali franchise did to her not only as an actor but also as a person. To this, the actor shared, “Baahubali was a film that I learned the most about. We were shooting against the green screen so we had to imagine a lot of things. I learnt much about VFX and how it’s used to enhance a film. It gave me a lot more confidence to be a lot more experimental. From there onwards, I really refrained from taking people’s opinions seriously. I started to trust my gut a lot more. It gave me a lot of insight into my own personality.”

About Baahubali The Epic

SS Rajamouli’s magnum opus films, Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017) will be released in theatres this Friday as one film, Baahubali: The Epic. The film tells the story of a man who learns the truth about his past and takes his rightful place on the throne. Baahubali: The Epic will be released in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi.

Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty and Tamannaah Bhatia play the leads in Baahubali: The Epic, which is directed by Rajamouli and produced by Arka Media Works. The film has a condensed runtime of 3 hours and 45 minutes. The film is being re-released not just in India, but also in over 1150 theatres worldwide.

According to Sacnilk, Baahubali had made ₹650 crore worldwide, while Baahubali 2 collected a whopping ₹1788.06 crore. The sequel holds the third position in the highest-grossing Indian films of all time after Dangal and Pushpa 2: The Rule.