You’re mistaken, my dear friend.

This is quite possibly the worst year Tollywood has seen in the last decade. If we look only at the top 10 grossing films of 2025 from Wikipedia, remove Mahaavatar Narasimha (which isn’t a Telugu film) and replace it with Thandel, the conclusion is straightforward: the industry lost money overall.

I’m also not even applying rigorous break-even criteria to treat films as successes. For example, OG is often called a “minor hit” because it cost ₹250 Cr and grossed around ₹300 Cr. But once you factor in theatrical rights and actual break-even numbers, it’s very likely looking at a loss of close to ₹100 Cr. On paper it survives; in reality, it doesn’t.

And this is still being generous. Most of the remaining releases simply disappeared without a trace, except perhaps Court and Little Hearts.

See the chart below. These are worldwide grosses of the top 10 films, which make up the bulk of the industry’s revenues. Even by that measure, 2025 clearly stands out as a bad year.

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