Allu Arjun’s Pushpa: The Rise put on a surprisingly good run in the Hindi theatrical market and it carried forward the momentum on OTT as well. Following Pushpa’s OTT debut on Amazon Prime Video, the film managed to catch the attention of the vast majority of the OTT audience, including commoners and film celebrities alike. Interestingly, noted international cricketers like Ravindra Jadeja, Suresh Raina, Dwayne Bravo, and David Warner shared videos of them dancing for the Srivalli song from Pushpa’s audio album. These indirect promotions built more hype for Pushpa and helped its cause on OTT.
Cut to now, there is a talk that Amazon Prime Video paid big bucks to these international cricketers to make them dance for Pushpa’s songs. Several memes and trolls pertaining to the same have been going viral on social media. It is rumored that Amazon Prime is running a paid campaign to promote Pushpa. But what needs to be noted is that these claims are as baseless as it can get.
Amazon Prime Video is a global OTT giant and they don’t have the need to promote Pushpa by paying cricketers to dance to the songs from the film’s audio album. The OTT giant has been associated with films that are much bigger in scale than Pushpa and never did they run paid campaigns. They are simply too big of an entity to do something like this. Moreover, the Srivalli step and the hand in beard act done by Allu Arjun were also replicated by players in small-time international cricket tournaments like Pakistan Bangladesh Premier League and Pakistan Super League and there is no way Amazon Prime is associated with it.
Well, it is common for a counter-argument to emerge when a film is the talk of the town for so very long, but that doesn’t necessarily need to be an authentic one. The same might be happening with Pushpa on Amazon Prime Video now.