Twenty-seven days in, and Irumudi has finally slowed down. It just also became the most profitable Telugu film of the year.

The Ravi Teja starrer earned 95 lakh on its fourth Wednesday, dropping below the one-crore mark for the first time in its run. That's a 26.92% fall from Tuesday's 1.3 crore, per Koimoi's tracking. Nobody at Mythri Movie Makers is losing sleep over that number, though. Not with what the film has already banked.

Irumudi's net collection stands at 185.15 crore, which works out to 218.48 crore gross. Made on a budget of 35 crore, that means a return on investment of 150.15 crore, the first time any Telugu release in 2026 has crossed the 150-crore ROI mark. It's also, going by Koimoi's numbers, the only Telugu film this year to have even touched 100 crore ROI. Put another way, the film has returned 429% on what it cost to make. Koimoi's own verdict system calls that a super duper hit, and it's hard to argue with the math.

That kind of return doesn't happen on opening weekend alone. Irumudi built through word of mouth over four weeks, holding numbers well past the point most mid-sized Telugu films start bleeding out. The film is directed by Shiva Nirvana, who also wrote it, and stars Priya Bhavani Shankar, Sai Kumar and Baby Nakshathra alongside Ravi Teja. Naveen Yerneni and Y Ravi Shankar produced under the Mythri banner, a studio that's had a run of its own this year across languages.

The theatrical window isn't quite closing yet, but it's winding down fast. Daily numbers under a crore usually mean a film is on its last legs at the multiplexes, and Irumudi's next stop is already locked in. It starts streaming on Netflix from September 18, barely a day after this report, which gives exhibitors one last weekend to squeeze out whatever's left before the audience simply waits for the app.

The question now isn't whether Irumudi worked. It clearly did, by the only measure that matters to a studio's balance sheet. The question is whether any other Telugu release this year gets close to that 150-crore ROI number before December, or whether Irumudi ends up owning that line item outright.