The actor currently sits level with Prabhas on three ₹1000 crore worldwide grossers apiece, and her Shah Rukh Khan reunion could settle that count for good.
Deepika Padukone hasn't released a film since Kalki 2898 AD in 2024. She's been off screen since, occupied with motherhood, but the box office math around her comeback is already running well ahead of the film itself.
According to Koimoi, Padukone is currently tied with Prabhas as the Indian actor with the most ₹1000 crore worldwide grossers, three each. The site's count for Prabhas is explicit: Baahubali, Baahubali 2 and Kalki 2898 AD, incidentally a film Padukone also starred in. Her own trio wasn't fully spelled out in the report, but the reasoning is straightforward. If her next film, King, crosses that mark globally, she'd have four to Prabhas's three and stand alone at the top, ahead of Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Ranveer Singh too, per Koimoi's tally.
That's a big if.
King reunites Padukone with Khan after Pathaan and Jawan, both of which did enormous business, and brings back director Siddharth Anand, who helmed Pathaan. Red Chillies Entertainment is producing. On paper, that's the kind of pairing that moves needles. But King hasn't released yet. No date has been confirmed in any of the reporting around this milestone talk, and there's no collection to speak of because there's no film in theatres.
So what we actually have is a hypothetical stacked on a hypothetical. Koimoi's argument depends on King clearing ₹1000 crore worldwide, a bar that only a handful of Indian films have ever cleared, and depends on that happening in a single theatrical run rather than across re-releases or extended windows. Trade watchers love this kind of framing months out from a release, because it gives a number-driven story to a film that otherwise has nothing to report beyond a cast and a director. It doesn't make the projection wrong. It just makes it a projection.
What isn't in dispute is the pairing itself. Khan and Padukone on screen together has been reliable business twice running, and Anand knows how to stage the kind of scale that pushes numbers past the ten-figure mark. Whether King actually gets there is a question for whenever it opens, not for a trade piece written before a trailer's even dropped.
For now, the record stays tied. Padukone and Prabhas, three apiece, and an unreleased film sitting between her and outright ownership of the number. The date King actually hits screens is the only thing that will settle it.
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