Reports that the Tollywood star Nagarjuna may be playing Chief Minister in the upcoming film has his fans thrilled. Sources in the know say that director Mahi V Raghav is planning a sequel to his biopic Yatra and may rope in Nag to play the lead role.
While Yatra was the biopic of the late Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh YS Rajasekar Reddy, the sequel will be the biopic of YSR’s son and the current CM of Andhra, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy. There is a strong possibility of Nag playing YS Jagan Mohan Reddy in Yatra 2, say sources.
Last year the film's director Mahi took to Twitter to announce the sequel. “YSR’s story is incomplete without Y.S. Raja reddy & Y.S.Jagan. Yatra 2 will complete their story. The reason why Yatra ended on Y.S. Jagan is we could take it off from where we left. YSR’s Yatra started from his father grave and Jagan’s Yatra from his father’s #yatra2 @ShivaMeka (sic),” wrote the director.
YSR’S story is incomplete without Y.S. Raja reddy & Y.S.Jagan. Yatra 2 will complete their story. The reason why Yatra ended on Y.S. Jagan is we could take it off from where we left. YSR’s Yatra started from his father grave and Jagan’s Yatra from his father’s #yatra2 @ShivaMeka
— Mahi Vraghav (@MahiVraghav) May 29, 2019
Yatra turned out to be a massive hit last year and there is a strong understanding that this film helped people fathom what a great leader YSR was and aware of all the welfare measures he had brought in for the citizens. In a way, the biopic helped YS Jagan Mohan Reddy to gain a landslide victory in the state legislative assembly elections.
Produced by Vijay Chilla and Shashi Devireddy under the banner 70 MM Pictures, Yatra had Mammootty playing YSR. It had a bevvy of stars in the cast including Jagapathi Babu, who plays YSR's father YS Raja Reddy, Rao Ramesh as KVP Ramachandra Rao, who was YSR's closest friend from his medical college days and Suhasini Mani Ratnam as the former minister Sabitha Indra Reddy.
It also had Anasuya Bharadwaj, Posani Krishna Murali, Vinod Kumar and Sachin Khedekar in supporting roles. The film’s technical crew included K for music, Sathyan Sooryan for cinematography and A Sreekar Prasad for editing. In this biopic, director Mahi V Raghav traced out YSR’s political journey and his famous Pada Yatra in 2003 that put him on the Chief Minister’s chair.
While the prep work for Yatra 2 is on, Nagarjuna has Brahmastra in Hindi and Wild Dog in Telugu. Directed by Ayan Mukherji, Brahmastra has Amitabh Bachchan in an important role with Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt as the lead pair. The others in the star cast are Mouni Roy, Dimple Kapadia, Prateik Babbar, Divyenndu, Vishal Karwa, Saurav Gurjar and Rashi Mal.
Shah Rukh Khan will be seen in a cameo in this flick. Pritam, Steel Banglez and Tanishk Bagchi are composing the tunes for this flick with V Manikandan and Patrick Duroux cranking the camera and editing by Akiv Ali and Manik Dawar.
Ashishor Solomon is making his debut as director with Wild Dog and it is produced by Matinee Entertainment. The technical crew of this flick includes Shaneil Deo for handling the cinematography, Kiran Kumar for penning the dialogues and David Ismalone for choreographing the action sequences.
The makers have completed shooting about 70% of the film. The team had been camping in Goa in the month of March to complete a shooting schedule and plans were on to travel to Thailand for the next schedule. However, with the coronavirus outbreak in China plans had to be cancelled. It remains to be seen if the team will change the location of its next schedule or wait to travel to Thailand under safer conditions.
(Content provided by Digital Native)