a 14th-century Rajput ruler, in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's period drama Padmaavat (2018), co-starring Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh. Amid violent protests by right-wing Hindu groups, who speculated that the film distorted historical facts, it was cleared for release by the CBFC after several modifications were made. Ankur Pathak of HuffPost was disappointed in the film's adherence to regressive patriarchal mores and criticised Kapoor for being "a bit too stiff and robotic". Padmaavat had a production budget of , making it the most expensive Hindi film ever made. With a worldwide gross of , it ranks among the highest-grossing Indian films of all time and is the biggest success of Kapoor's career. Later that year, he starred in Batti Gul Meter Chalu, a social problem film about electricity issues in rural India, for which he learnt the Garhwali dialect. Filming was temporarily suspended when its production company, KriArj Entertainment, failed to remunerate the crew, and resumed after Bhushan Kumar took over the project. Saibal Chatterjee reviewed, "Kapoor, working within a screenplay that is undercooked and confused, tries his very best to make the best of a bad deal but is unable to pack any real power". In 2019, Kapoor starred in Kabir Singh, a remake of the Telugu romantic drama Arjun Reddy (2017), in which he played a self-destructive alcoholic pining for his ex-girlfriend. He found it challenging to distance himself from the part, and feared bringing home the experience to his wife and children. For scenes in which he played a college student, he lost 14 kg. Writing for The Indian Express, Shubhra Gupta criticised the film's misogynistic themes and found Kapoor to be "too old for this role, and his dissolution never feels as sharply realized as the one he managed so superbly in Udta Punjab". Even so, it earned over worldwide to emerge as the second highest-grossing Hindi film of the year and Kapoor's biggest commercial success in which he played the sole male lead. He received another Best Actor nomination at Filmfare. 2020–present After a three-year absence from the screen, Kapoor starred in the sports drama Jersey (2022), a remake of the Telugu film of the same name, about a former cricketer who wants to make a comeback in his late 30s. While filming for a cricket sequence, he suffered an injury to his forehead that needed 13 stitches. Production and release of the film was delayed