Top Actors in Tamil Cinema: 2016

In India, two of the most well-known Tamil actors are Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan. But not many in the North, West and East of India would know that there are other stars who not only command a insanely big fan-following, but are literally worshipped by their fans.

Two such stars, who belong to the younger generation (compared to the likes of Rajnikanth and Kamal Hassan) are Vijay, fondly called ‘thalapathi’ by his fans, and Ajith, who his fans like to call ‘thala’.

We organised a poll on our official Twitter page. The four options, not including Rajni and Kamal, were Suriya, Ajith, Vijay and Vikram.

Like most polls involving two of the most loved stars in Bollywood – Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan – the voting was dominated by Ajith and Vijay.

Ajith was leading in the beginning by nearly 55% votes, but when our tweet began to get more retweets, Vijay got plenty of votes and eventually it got pretty close between the two.

But the real battle for the top actor in Tamil cinema came in the last 6 hours of polling. Nearly 5,000 out of 10,000 votes were registered in the last 6 hours, most of them going to ‘Thalapathi’ and ‘Thala’. With less than 15 minutes remaining, it was Vijay leading with 1%. But by the time the poll ended, the percentage of votes were the same, with Twitter declaring Vijay as the winner.

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The Vijay vs Ajith battle was won by the smallest of margins, indicating that both stars command a huge following and there is very little to choose between the two when it comes to fan-following.

Check out our tweet:

Khans, Hrithik, Akshay are the Top stars in Bollywood. Who rules the Tamil industry? Not including Rajnikant, KamalH

— Indicine.com (@indicine) April 30, 2016

The reach of our tweet was unbelievably huge too. It received more than 100,000 impressions, 22,100 plus engagements, 1605 retweets and 423 replies (a lot of these replies included movie recommendations of films starring Vijay and Ajith)

According to a well-known Tamil film trade analyst who didn’t want to be named, the Top 10 Actors in the Tamil Film Industry are as follows (includes the highest paid actors as of 2016):

1. Rajnikanth (25-30 crore per film)
2. Kamal Hassan (25 crore per film)
3. Vijay (20-22 crore per film)
4. Ajith (20-22 crore per film)
5. Suriya (12-13 crore per film)
6. Vikram (12 crore per film)
7. Karthi (8 crore per film)
8. Dhanush (7 crore per film)
9. Silambarasan a.k.a Simbu (7 crore per film)
10. Arya (5 crore per film)

For the Bollywood audience and our readers from the South, who are your favourite Tamil stars? Vote!