Ram Charan has played warriors, rebels, and revolutionaries. He has never played a sportsman. That changes on June 4, when Peddi arrives in theatres with him as a sportsman from 1980s rural Andhra Pradesh. What most people do not know is that his father tried this exact thing once, in 1985, and then never did it again for the rest of his career.Released in 1985, Vijetha was directed by A. Kodandarami Reddy and produced by Allu Aravind under the Geetha Arts banner. It was a remake of a 1981 Bengali film that had also been adapted into Hindi the same year with Anil Kapoor in the lead role. The Telugu version localised the sport to football and anchored the story firmly in family emotion rather than sporting spectacle.Chiranjeevi played Chinnababu, a young man from a middle-class household who dreams of representing the country as a footballer. While his father does not support the ambition, his coach does. Between those two poles, the story unfolds not as a conventional sports drama but as something closer to a film about duty, love, and what a person is willing to sacrifice for the people they care about.The football is the backdrop and the sacrifice is the story. When Chinnababu’s family cannot raise enough money for his younger sister’s wedding, he quietly donates a kidney to a wealthy family, hands over the money, and misses the wedding entirely rather than let his family know what he has done. It is a film about a sportsman who, when it matters most, sets the sport aside entirely.Also Read: Chiranjeevi saves Ram Charan’s Peddi, Telangana theatres give green light under rental systemWhat Vijetha won and why it matteredVijetha came two years after Khaidi had established Chiranjeevi as one of the most exciting leading men in the industry. He was at the point in his career where audiences expected action, energy, and spectacle. Vijetha gave them something different, something rooted in the everyday emotional world of a middle-class Telugu family. That the film worked commercially and won him critical acclaim said something important about the range he was capable of, and about the appetite Telugu audiences had for stories that went beyond pure entertainment.Vijetha also carries another layer of historical interest that often goes unmentioned. It marked the first ever screen appearance of Allu Arjun in Telugu cinema, who appeared in the film as a child. A production that launched Allu Arjun and starred Chiranjeevi is now being revisited in the context of a film starring Chiranjeevi’s son. The Konidela and Allu families have been intertwined across Telugu cinema for decades, and Vijetha sits at one of the earliest points of that connection.Story continues below this adWhy Chiranjeevi never did it againAcross a decades-long career spanning over 150 films, from action and family dramas to comedies, mythologicals, and political stories, Chiranjeevi never returned to a sports-based role. Vijetha remained a standalone moment, a one-time departure from the template that made him the biggest star Telugu cinema had ever seen.Also Read: Jr NTR visits NTR Ghat to mark grandfather NT Rama Rao’s 103rd birth anniversaryThe Telugu film industry, for most of the 1980s and 1990s, did not produce sports dramas at scale. The genre that could have given him a second shot at this kind of role simply was not being made in significant numbers. When Chiranjeevi was at his commercial peak, sports dramas were not what the market was demanding or what studios were commissioning. Vijetha existed almost in spite of the trends of its time, and there was nothing around it to build on.What Peddi changesRam Charan’s situation in 2026 is fundamentally different. Peddi is not a family drama that happens to involve sport. It is a full-scale period sports drama, built from the ground up around the world of kabaddi and other sports, set in a specific era and a specific geography, and AR Rahman composing the music. The sport is the entire foundation.Story continues below this adRam Charan learned the Vizianagaram dialect for the role, underwent physical transformations under a specialist fitness coach, and has been working on this film since its launch in March 2024. The film is directed by Buchi Babu Sana, who made Uppena, and stars Janhvi Kapoor as the female lead alongside Shiva Rajkumar and Jagapathi Babu in key roles. The ambition is of a different order entirely compared to what Vijetha was attempting.And yet the instinct is the same. Father and son, separated by four decades, both chose to step outside the comfort zone of the action hero at a significant point in their careers and try something that required them to become physically different, emotionally grounded in the world of sport, and more vulnerable than the characters their audiences were used to seeing them play.Chiranjeevi did it once, Ram Charan is doing it now, on a scale that would have been unimaginable in 1985, with the entire Telugu film industry watching what happens next. The torch, it turns out, has been in the family all along.