4 minutes of readingHyderabadFebruary 3, 2026 06:52 pm IST
There is a moment in every actor’s career when numbers stop being personal and begin to become history. For ChiranjeeviThat moment came not once, but repeatedly, and the final chapter, opening right now at the box office, is perhaps the most satisfying of all.
Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu has earned more than Rs 350 crore worldwide, according to the film’s production company. It is the highest-grossing film of Chiranjeevi’s entire career and has already become the biggest Sankranti release in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. But to understand how significant that figure is, you have to go back not just a few years, but more than three decades, to a time when Chiranjeevi was not just a record-breaker.
It was 1992. Indian cinema was a different world. The biggest names in the business, including Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, charged fees ranging from Rs 60 to Rs 80 lakh per film. No one had yet crossed the Rs 1 million barrier. It was a figure that seemed almost mythical, a threshold that seemed more aspirational than attainable.
Then Chiranjeevi crossed him. According to The Week Magazine, for his role in Aapadbandhavudu, directed by the legendary K. Viswanath Chiranjeevi, he received 1.25 million rupees, making him not only the highest-paid actor in India at the time, but the first Indian actor to command a fee of that magnitude for a single film.
A Telugu actor, working mainly in a regional language, had become the most commercially valuable actor in the entire country. After Chiranjeevi set that benchmark, the floodgates opened. Kamal Haasan crossed 1 crore in 1994. Rajinikanth followed soon after.
But this is what makes the success of Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu so compelling: Chiranjeevi is not the same actor he was in 1992. He took a nearly decade-long break from films to enter politics, founding the Praja Rajyam Party in 2008 and eventually serving as a Union Minister. He returned to the screen in 2017 with Khaidi No. 150, and while that film was a solid commercial success, the question remained whether he could regain his previous dominance. Sye Raa proved in 2019 that she still had weight. But it was a gamble, a test of whether the public would show up for a man in his 60s like before.
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Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu definitively answers that question. Directed by Anil Ravipudi and co-starring Venkatesh and Nayanthara, the film crossed its Rs 200 crore production mark. budget and is now generating pure returns. Its overseas box office performance has been particularly surprising, surpassing Sye Raa’s lifetime international grosses and becoming Chiranjeevi’s highest-grossing film in North America.
The numbers tell a story. However, the more important story is what they mean. Thirty-three years after a young Chiranjeevi made headlines by becoming the first Indian actor to earn Rs 1 crore for a film, he is still the one setting the benchmarks, just on a very different scale. The industry it helped reshape in the early ’90s has grown tremendously since then. The budgets are bigger, there are more screens and the audience is global. But the fundamental truth that Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu is demonstrating, right now, in real time, is the same that Gharana Mogudu demonstrated all those years ago.
When Chiranjeevi decides to appear, the box office still listens.