‘Box office collections are inflated,’ admits producer Naga Vamsi: ‘Why publish correct ones?’

According to Naga Vamsi, the practice exists largely to keep audiences invested in a film’s performance rather than to deceive anyone for financial gain. “We do this for fans, just for their happiness. How will we know if a big movie star’s film is a hit? Big heroes make films to make their fans happy at the end of the day,” he said.

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He was, however, careful to draw a line between rounding up figures and outright fabrication. “If a movie makes Rs 100, we say Rs 110. We don’t jump a leap and lie that it made Rs 200,” he added, suggesting that any adjustment to numbers tends to be modest rather than a distortion of a film’s actual performance.

Naga Vamsi’s production house has backed a mix of commercially successful and underperforming films in recent years, including Kingdom, Mad Square and the 2026 release Anaganaga Oka Raju. He has also produced films like Daaku Maharaj, Lucky Baskhar, among others.

As an example of this gap between official claims and independent tracking, Naga Vamsi’s recent productions have seen differences between numbers put out by the production house’s official posters and those tracked by Sacnilk. Daaku Maharaaj, for instance, was reported to have collected Rs 56 crore on its opening day by the production house, while Sacnilk placed the figure at Rs 41.24 crore. The gap widened by day 5, when the production house announced that the film had entered the “Rs 100 crore club” with collections of Rs 114 crore worldwide, whereas Sacnilk’s tracking showed the film had earned only Rs 94.18 crore by that point.

With Kingdom, where the production house claimed an opening weekend collection of Rs 82 crore, a similar pattern was noticed when compared against Sacnilk’s estimate of Rs 65.76 crore. These discrepancies, running into double digits of crores in some cases, are the kind of numbers Vamsi’s comments appear to be referring to, even as he maintains that the industry’s rounding up of figures stays modest rather than wildly exaggerated.

His comments touch on a practice that has long been an open secret in the Telugu film trade, where box office figures released through posters and press notes are frequently viewed with some skepticism by both trade trackers and audiences. Independent trackers such as Sacnilk and various trade analysts often publish their own accounts, which do not always match the numbers put out by production banners, leading to periodic disputes over a film’s actual earnings.