While many people would say that Spider-Man: No Way Home had the most awaited trailer of the year, there are others who would argue that honor goes to director SS Rajamouli’s magnum opus RRR. It was screened in selected cinemas today and while it was not meant to make its online debut until 4 pm, the studio realized that images were already appearing on social media and put out the trailer earlier than planned to get full impact – and it did just that, racking up 17 million views in a very short space of time.

The Indian Telugu-language movie is described as a period action drama, and from the raw, emotional and intense trailer there is certainly a lot of action going on and it comes with all the style and gloss that you would expect. The story tells of two Indian revolutionaries in the 1920s who fought against the British Raj and Nazam of Hyderabad. Rajamouli penned his screenplay for the huge movie from a story by K. V. Vijayendra Prasad. Being an epic story with many dialects involved, the working title of RRR was adapted to be the official title because the director wanted to ensure that having a title in just one of those languages wouldn’t alienate speakers of other languages from seeing the movie.

“When I read about Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, it was exciting to know that their story is similar. They never met each other. What if they had met? What if they had got inspired by each other? That is what RRR is about. It is completely fictitious. The film is mounted on a very large scale. We had to do a lot of research for it. To know costumes, their dialect, their way of living and that is why it took so much time for us to get this together,” Rajamouli told The Indian Express back in 2019.

For anyone who thinks there is a heavy emphasis on action in the movie would be right, so much so that lead actors N. T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan had to take part in a specially set up workshop to carry out physical training for their respective roles of Komaram Bheem, a Gond tribal leader who fought for the liberation of Hyderabad State, and Alluri Sitarama Raju, an activist and tribal leader involved in the fight against the British Raj and was part of the Indian Independence Movement. However, the film is much more than just another action movie for Rajamouli, telling a story across multiple languages and even though it is fictional, the fact that it's based in a time period that was pivotal in the history of India gives it a deep-cutting edge.

RRR, which is made up of the initial letters of the actual written title of the film which translates in from most languages to Rage, War, Blood, will finally be released on January 7th, 2022. The film has been postponed numerous times thanks to the COVID pandemic, which has affected the Indian film industry every bit as much as Hollywood. The film will release in Telugu along with the dubbed versions in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and other Indian and foreign languages and judging by just the reactions to the trailer, Rajamouli is about to bring his own Avengers: Endgame level movie to Indian cinemas.