Su From So: Raj B Shetty sets the record straight on the budget of his hit film

After the box office success of Su From So, it was reported that Raj B Shetty, the producer of the JP Thuminad directorial, had made it on a shoestring budget

Su From So, Kannada cinema’s first major hit of 2025, is a Raj B Shetty production, which, until a week or two before its release, no one even knew it existed. Out of the blue, Raj and his team announced that they’d been busy making a film and gave audiences a gist of what to expect by dropping a song, Danks Anthem, a peppy dance number, which he followed up with the trailer, which didn’t feature him. Then, instead of going on a promotion blitzkrieg, they decided to let the content do the talking and had paid premieres in select cities, to let word-of-mouth publicity do the trick. And boy did it work for them.

A caricature poster of Raj B Shetty's character in Su From So

Su From So is not only the highest grossing Kannada film of 2025 so far, but the return on investment has been 10-fold, said Raj recently, setting the record straight on reports about the budget. Shortly after Su From So came out, an industry tracker tweeted that the production budget of Su From So was ₹1.5 cr only, which was picked up and published widely. While Raj admits that Su From So is a small film, it is not so small also.

Su From So shot over 50 days with 30 highly-paid theatre artistes

During the promotions of the film’s Telugu dubbed version’s release in Hyderabad, Raj explained that he’d spent ₹4.5 cr on production, and another ₹1 cr to ₹1.5 cr on its subsequent promotions, release in Karnataka and other states. In fact, back when he made Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana (which is available on OTTplay Premium), he’d spent ₹1.8 cr on it.

Raj, meanwhile, is also an actor in the film, a detail that he chose to keep a secret until the release. His objective was to prove that even new faces could sell a film and Su From So’s massive success is testimony that his strategy worked. Written by director JP Thuminad, Su From So revolves around his character Ashoka, who pretends to be possessed to get out of sticky situation, which makes matters only worse for him, once they identify the ‘ghost’ within him – Sulochana From Someshwar.