Thirty-five crore in, two hundred and ten crore out. That's the maths on Irumudi right now, and it's why the film has quietly become one of Tollywood's better stories of the year.

On its third Saturday, the Ravi Teja starrer added 5.78 crore in India and another 10 lakh overseas, according to trade tracking site Koimoi. That takes its 16-day worldwide gross to 210.27 crore, split between 188.27 crore domestic and 22 crore from international markets.

The number that matters here isn't the daily add. It's the ranking. With that 210.27 crore tally, Irumudi has gone past Prabhas' The RajaSaab, which closed its run at 206.57 crore, to sit third among Telugu films released in 2026. Sixteen days ago this was a film nobody was pricing in as a threat to a Prabhas release. Now it's above one on the year-end table.

Third is likely where it stays. Koimoi's numbers put Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu well out of reach at the top of the 2026 chart, at 300.79 crore, a gap Irumudi's current trajectory can't realistically close. But the film still has legs. Three weekends in and it's holding well enough that Koimoi's own projection has it touching 250 crore before the run ends, which would be a very healthy final number for a movie that reportedly cost 35 crore to make.

That budget-to-gross ratio is the real headline for Mythri Movie Makers, the studio backing the film through producers Naveen Yerneni and Y Ravi Shankar. Written and directed by Shiva Nirvana, Irumudi leans on the kind of family-entertainer template that's traditionally been the safest bet in Telugu cinema, and it's paying off here in a year that's had its share of expensive misfires. Priya Bhavani Shankar, Sai Kumar and Baby Nakshathra round out a cast that's stayed largely out of the headlines while the film's collections have done the talking.

What happens next depends on how the fourth weekend behaves. Telugu word-of-mouth hits usually taper hard once the third Saturday-Sunday cycle is done, and Irumudi's daily numbers, while still positive, aren't the kind that suggest a dramatic late surge. Getting from 210 crore to 250 crore in the remaining days will need steady weekday holds rather than another weekend spike.

Either way, the film has already done the thing that matters most for a mid-budget Telugu release: it's turned a modest number into a genuinely large one, and put itself on a 2026 list that includes names with far bigger stars and far bigger marketing spends attached to them.