Pushpaka Vimanam on JioHotstar: Sai Ronak’s time-travel series streams from 12 November

A lift is the time machine in Pushpaka Vimanam, the Telugu series that JioHotstar begins streaming on Thursday, 12 November. Sai Ronak plays Pushpak Rao, an insurance agent who finds that it can carry him into the past. The platform’s synopsis gives the catch in one line: he changes a single thing there, and everything in his present is put at risk.

The series is billed under the Hotstar Specials label. Satish Reddy Mallidi directs it for Global Creations, and the platform’s listing names Madhoo Damaraju, Vadlamani Srinivas and Raghu Karumanchi in the cast with Sai Ronak. The listing classes the show as a fantasy drama and gives Telugu as its original language. It does not yet show an episode count.

JioHotstar put a 2-minute-42-second announcement video on its Telugu YouTube channel on 25 October, and it had passed 24 lakh views by the morning of Wednesday, 11 November. It opens with Pushpak running through a street market, past baskets of marigolds, with a group of men behind him. Then comes an old lift behind a metal grille. A finger presses a button, and a mechanical counter shows 2005. In the artwork on the listing, the buttons beside the lift door carry years, 2024 and 2016 among them, where floor numbers would be.

The same trailer went up on JioHotstar’s Malayalam channel on 6 November and on its Tamil and Kannada channels on 9 November, each with the 12 November date.

A title with a history

The name is an old one. Singeetam Srinivasa Rao’s film without dialogue, starring Kamal Haasan, was released in Andhra Pradesh as Pushpaka Vimanam on 27 November 1987. Four years later the same director made Aditya 369, the Balakrishna film built around a time machine. Anand Deverakonda’s comedy thriller, also called Pushpaka Vimanam, opened in theatres on 12 November 2021, five years to the day before the series arrives.

Sai Ronak is known for the lead role in Pressure Cooker (2020), and his later films include Laggam and Rewind, both from 2024. JioHotstar released the first promo of the series on Tuesday, 10 November; three short clue videos titled Sherlock Sampath came before it, the third earlier the same day. The platform has also told viewers how to set an alert: search for the title in the app and tap Remind Me.