Allu Arjun makes four friends co-producers on Lokesh film

The Lokesh Kanagaraj project still has no title, no cast list and no start date. What it does have, as of Friendship Day, is four new names on the credit block.

Allu Arjun spent Friendship Day handing out production credits. Four people from his personal circle, Bunny Vas, Sandeep Ramineni, Natraj and Swathi, have been named co-producers on his upcoming film with Lokesh Kanagaraj, which Mythri Movie Makers is mounting under Naveen Yerneni and Ravi Shankar. The announcement went out on 2 August, and it is the most concrete thing anyone has said about the project in months.

That is the part worth noticing. The Lokesh collaboration, currently going by AA23, has been in the almost-confirmed zone since the start of the year. No title, no heroine, no locked start date; the shoot is being pencilled in for next year, once Allu Arjun is done with Raaka, Atlee’s fantasy film for Sun Pictures. A project in that state has nothing to release and nothing to show. Turning your friends into co-producers on a calendar occasion is, among other things, a way of putting the film back in the news without a frame of footage.

The sentiment behind it is real enough. Sandeep Ramineni and Natraj have been around since Allu Arjun’s school years, long before the Pushpa scale of fame. Swathi is a relative who has been a friend since childhood. None of the three arrive with a filmography; they arrive with two decades of proximity, and Allu Arjun has now put that on paper in a place where credits carry weight and, eventually, money.

Bunny Vas is the outlier in the group, and the reason the list is not purely ceremonial. He has been Allu Arjun’s right hand for years, co-founded GA2 Pictures, and has produced films including Geetha Govindam and Bhale Bhale Magadivoy. He knows how a Telugu production floor actually runs. Whatever the other three contribute, the credit block is not short of someone who has done the job.

For Mythri Movie Makers, currently expanding hard into Tamil production, sharing the co-producer line costs very little and buys a lot of goodwill from a star whose next four years they would like to be involved in. Allu Arjun gets a story that makes him look loyal. His friends get their names on one of the biggest Indian films currently in the pipeline. The film itself, meanwhile, still has to be announced properly.