Fauzi poster: Prabhas, two guns and a burning Hyderabad

The Fauzi team spent Independence Day refusing to celebrate it. Where every other banner posted tricolours and salutes, Prabhas’ period actioner dropped a poster of a street that war has already finished with: smoke, fire, gutted buildings, bodies in the debris, and the Charminar standing intact in the distance. The line the makers attached does the framing for them: before freedom became a celebration, it was a battle.

Prabhas’ face is nowhere in the frame, which is itself the flex. He walks barefoot through the wreckage, vest and dhoti soaked in blood, a snub machine pistol in one hand and a revolver in the other. Ahead of him, a frail elderly man in a plain white dhoti picks his way through the same street with a walking staff, and the gap between those two silhouettes is the poster’s whole story. Look closer and the sky is ghosted over with a grid of numerals and Devanagari verse, and one row of the grid quietly spells out the word Operation. With the Charminar fixing the geography to Hyderabad, the teaser trail is not hard to follow, though the makers are saying nothing yet.

The film itself stays on schedule: a worldwide theatrical release on December 3, 2026. Hanu Raghavapudi of Sita Ramam writes and directs, Mythri Movie Makers produces, and T-Series presents, with Naveen Yerneni, Y Ravi Shankar and Bhushan Kumar bankrolling. Imanvi plays the female lead, and the supporting bench is stacked with veterans: Anupam Kher, Mithun Chakraborty, Jaya Prada and Bhanu Chandar.

The craft team is equally deliberate. Sudeep Chatterjee, the cinematographer behind Padmaavat’s painterly frames, shoots; Vishal Chandrasekhar, a familiar name to Tamil listeners, composes; Kotagiri Venkateswara Rao edits and Anil Vilas Jadhav handles production design. Every drop so far, from the title poster to the first look, has been cut from this same soot-and-blood cloth, and the December 3 date now has a war to sell.