Rajinikanth is 75 and remains the biggest box-office draw in Tamil cinema. His new film Jailer 2 has just become the highest-grossing Tamil movie ever, and it did it in just 11 days.
According to Sacnilk figures reported by Business Standard, the film had made ₹710.35 crore worldwide by Sunday, October 25. (A crore is 10 million rupees.) That's about ₹466.85 crore from India and roughly ₹243.5 crore from overseas. It passed the ₹691 crore lifetime total of 2.0, which had held the top spot for about eight years. It's also the first Tamil film to cross ₹700 crore and only the 18th Indian film to reach that mark. Along the way, it set records as the fastest Tamil film to hit ₹300 crore and ₹400 crore.
The movie opened on October 15. Nelson Dilipkumar directs again, Sun Pictures produces, and Anirudh Ravichander handles the music. Rajinikanth returns as Tiger Muthuvel Pandian, the retired jailer from the 2023 hit, and the supporting cast reads like an all-star lineup from across Indian cinema: Mohanlal, Shivarajkumar, Mithun Chakraborty, Vidya Balan and Vijay Sethupathi. It's not just a Tamil-language hit, either. On its second Sunday, it was still playing thousands of shows in Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada.
It isn't the biggest Indian film of the year, though. That's still Dhurandhar 2, which Gulf News put at over ₹1,640 crore worldwide. But Jailer 2's run shows how far regional Indian films now travel, with overseas audiences making up a big chunk of the money.
Hollywood keeps talking about franchise fatigue. Meanwhile, a 75-year-old star is breaking records with a sequel. What's his secret, and is there a Hollywood actor with that kind of pull today?
