As the 2023 awards season closes in, studios are beginning to ramp up the promotions. Movies that premiered earlier in the year have a larger chance of being forgotten by audiences and critics, so a popular tactic is event screenings. One such screening brought about something particularly special. At a Beyond Fest screening of RRR, the famous dance sequence took hold of theater attendees. The attendees ran to the front of the theater and started dancing along! Recordings of the event can be viewed below.
The screening of RRR was coordinated by Beyond Fest and held at the Los Angeles Chinese Theater. Tickets for the screening went on sale on January 4th and sold out within 98 minutes! Director and writer S.S. Rajamouli attended the screening with stars N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan, the three opened the screening with director J.J. Abrams and followed up with a Q&A afterwards.
Cinema That Sparks A Fire
Variance Films
Several more candid recordings of the screening were posted online, showing that the dance number wasn’t the only time the crowd was sucked in. Audiences were clapping, cheering, and hollering the whole way through. Even the official RRR Twitter account shared a few clips of audiences cheering along.
RRR Aims To Sweep The Awards
RRR is a film that tells the story of two famous Indian revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, as they push back against the British Raj. While the main characters are real figureheads, the film takes place in a time in both their lives that is undocumented. In the film, Bheem is a member of the Gond tribe who sets off to infiltrate the British Raj in order to save the kidnapped girl Malli. Meanwhile, Raju is a member of the Indian Imperial Police who has been hired to protect the Raj. After an incident where the two team up to save a child, Bheem and Raju form a strong friendship which is tested against their two opposing goals.
The dance sequence in particular is midway through the film, when Bheem has fully infiltrated the Raj’s estate. The two heroes erupt into a big dance that both excites and upsets their hosts. The dance sequence can be viewed in all its glory below.
RRR premiered in March 2022 and was a smash hit worldwide. When it was time for a streaming release, Netflix was quick to snatch up the rights and distributed the film in May. Soon after, the film charged to the #1 most-watched non-English film on the platform.
Now that it’s awards season, the RRR team doesn’t want audiences to forget its impact from last year. So far the film has an impressive 45 nominations worldwide, winning nine of them so far. These awards include the Saturn for Best International Film, The New York Film Critics Circle for Best Director, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists for Best Non-English Language Film. Currently, the film is nominated for two Golden Globes, Best Original Song and Best Non-English Language Film. We’ll be finding out tonight if the RRR team will be coming home with those!
There is currently no news of the coveted Academy Awards, but there is a big push for the historical epic to be in the running. According to IndieWire, Jason Blum is already predicting for RRR to take home the award for Best Picture. Regardless of how well the film does at the awards, RRR has absolutely made a huge impact on audiences worldwide, paving the way for Indian cinema to gain wider audiences than ever before.
