The trailer of Kalki 2898 AD looks like the game changer Indian cinema in 2024 needs. But in this article/story, we’re going to look at the genius of Kalki 2898 AD’s marketing campaign.
For one second, let’s forget about creating hype around the film. There’s so much content and information overload in the world and in the minds of the audience that it’s difficult to even make them aware that your film exists. This is a problem worldwide. One example is Fall Guys, a big-budget film with big stars and big action. It cost around $140-$150 million to make and then millions more on their marketing campaign.
But the movie fell flat at the box office. One reason is the audience couldn’t understand whether it was a movie coming out in theaters or a streaming movie. So it’s getting tougher for any film to stand out. But here’s what makes Kalki a little different. Yes, it has Prabhas, Deepika Padukone, Amitabh Bachchan, even Kamal Haasan as part of the star cast. Santosh Narayan is doing the music. It has world-class special effects. All of these are USPs that guarantee a very strong box office opening. But Nag Ashwin is a filmmaker who doesn’t want to settle for just this. He doesn’t seem like someone who’s going to take his stars for granted. From positioning Kalki as the first Indian film to be presented at the San Diego Comic-Con to taking the less-is-more approach by just teasing a few frames of a young Amitabh Bachchan, to dubbing each dialogue of the teaser in a different Indian language, this is shaping up to be one of the most well-thought-out marketing campaigns for a film in recent times. But the truth is, they were just getting started.
Most products around the world, especially expensive products like movies, are sold on the promise of a USP or unique selling proposition, which means there has to be something in it that can help it sell to the consumer. That consumer could be the general audience, theater owners, distributors, streaming platforms, music labels, whoever you can think of. For most Indian films, it’s the stars that are the USP, and that’s been the case with every Prabhas film post-Baahubali. Filmmakers take Prabhas the Star as the USP first and then think of an idea and create a project around him to pull in his fans during the opening weekend. But because there is so much burden placed on the star, other elements, like the screenplay, take a back seat, and the word-of-mouth factor turns negative. So using the stars as the USP is not enough. Kunal Shah, the founder of Cred, keeps talking about this term called UBP, a unique, bragworthy proposition—a product’s feature that humans love to brag about to others who haven’t discovered it yet. And with Kalki, the makers have cracked the UBP, which is not a star.
Actually, it’s not even human. I think Kalki’s hype level can be divided into two phases: before Bujji and after Bujji. We’ve already experienced AI personalities like Jarvis from Iron Man to Samantha from Her. We’ve gone crazy over all the vehicles, from the cars in the James Bond series to the DeLorean from Back to the Future, and of course, all the variations of the Batmobile. But to see a combination of an AI with a snarky personality that keeps roasting the lead hero and a futuristic vehicle in a Telugu film is something that’s really, really fresh. And to elevate that, the fact that they built the car from scratch as a fully functional vehicle, how they’re positioning it through AutoCar India, getting an automobile journalist to review its specifications, getting actors like Naga Chaitanya, and Formula One racers like Narain Karthikeyan to take it for a spin, taking it on road shows across cities for the general public to get a glimpse of it, and enabling user-generated content that spreads across social media profiles, going one step further and even releasing a fully animated prelude on Amazon Prime Video—a prequel series that establishes the bond between Bujji and Bhairava.
One, it’s a huge marketing win in terms of creating awareness around the film. Two, it’s tapped into two completely different target audiences: adult automobile fans on one side and children and their parents on the other side. And three, it’s like there’s already an emotional connection established between the audience and Bujji and Bhairava. So half the job of the film is already done. Even though the makers positioned Bujji as the hero of their marketing campaign, they’re trying to make sure that every other player also gets attention. Especially for movies made on a massive scale, there’s always an extra opportunity to get the audience excited using an asset like behind-the-scenes footage. After a very long time, a film like Kalki is using its making process to add to the hype that Bujji has already built. Every video in the “From Scratch” series introduces us to a new aspect of the film, from how they created Bujji to the costumes to my personal favorite, the “Reimagining of Guns” video that introduces us to all the new kinds of guns they created, especially for this film. But there’s one thing that sets these videos apart from the rest of the competition.
Last year, there was a very big-budget film with a very big star that came out, and even for that film, they showed the making process, mainly the struggle of shooting in a particular location. And of course, big respect for the work that each member of the crew puts in for every single frame. But many people from the audience felt that the tone was slightly serious. More than that, it was trying so hard to emotionally manipulate you into believing that there is so much work that’s gone into this film. And that’s why you should treat the film differently. What I personally liked about Kalki’s making videos is its tone. Yes, it’s going to be a serious sci-fi film. It’s going to be a post-apocalyptic film with a lot of mythological themes, but you can see that the team had a lot of fun making it, and they’re not taking themselves too seriously. It shows in the editing pattern, the interaction between the crew members. For example, there’s a scene where Bujji asks Nag Ashwin, the filmmaker himself, about why it’s taking the team so long to build a few guns. He just looks back at the poster of Kalki, which says the release is May ’27.
For most movies, the marketing campaign begins with the release of the trailer. But with Kalki, there’s already a solid foundation, a trampoline that has been set from which the trailer is going to boost the hype around the film to a whole new level, setting up Prabhas as just one of the elements of a vast universe and storyline, teasing us with just the right amount of story and conflict revealed, action shots, and of course, giving us Kamal Haasan in an avatar we’ve never seen before.
