6 min readNew DelhiJul 22, 2026 12:25 PM IST The extravagant entourages of movie stars have been making headlines ever since the pandemic. While celebrities travelling with large teams wasn’t a new phenomenon, the conversation around it intensified after the pandemic, when several big-budget films began underperforming at the box office. As producers struggled to recover investments running into hundreds of crores, attention shifted to how these massive budgets were being spent. Industry insiders began questioning how much of a film’s budget actually went into production and how much was spent on star salaries and their lavish demands. Reports of spot boys earning thousands of rupees per day, actors asking for multiple vanity vans—one for a gym, another with a live kitchen—and other expensive requirements became increasingly common. The stark difference between a film’s production cost and its overall budget was highlighted recently when the makers of Chiranjeevi’s Mana Shankara Varu Prasad Garu revealed that the film’s actual production cost was only around Rs 25 crore despite having a reported budget of Rs 200 crore. …