Ramayana — Nitesh Tiwari’s two-part IMAX epic starring Ranbir Kapoor as Ram and Yash as Ravana — released its global trailer at the end of July 2026, a year after the teaser that put Ranbir’s Ram on a Times Square billboard. At a reported ₹4,000 crore it is the most expensive Indian film ever mounted, and behind it sits the most technically ambitious visual effects program the country has ever attempted.
For once, the interesting story is not the star cast. It’s the pipeline. Here is the teaser, the trailer, and everything we actually know about how this thing was built.
Watch the Ramayana Teaser (Official)
And the full global trailer
The number everyone is arguing about: ₹4,000 crore
Producer Namit Malhotra has been unusually direct about the spend. In his own words, it “will be about $500 million by the time we are done with both the films — Part 1 and Part 2, which is over Rs 4000 crore.” That figure covers production plus prints and advertising across both instalments, and it makes Ramayana the most expensive Indian film project ever mounted by a wide margin.
For scale: that is roughly the combined budget of a mid-tier Marvel film and a Denis Villeneuve science-fiction epic, spent on a story that has never had a big-budget, effects-forward, globally-distributed treatment.
Various cast fee figures have circulated in the trade press, but none have been confirmed by the production, so we are not going to repeat them here. The structural point survives without them: on a film at this budget, even top-tier star salaries are a small fraction of the total. The overwhelming majority of ₹4,000 crore is going into the thing this site actually cares about — the technology.
DNEG: the VFX house that is also the producer
The single most important structural fact about Ramayana is that the visual effects vendor and the production company are the same organisation. Namit Malhotra founded Prime Focus, and he is also the global CEO of DNEG — the eight-time Academy Award-winning visual effects studio behind Inception, Interstellar, Blade Runner 2049, First Man, Tenet, Dune and Dune: Part Two.
DNEG began life as Double Negative in London in 1998 and became the India-linked giant it is today through its 2014 merger with Prime Focus. It now runs roughly 3,000 staff across ten Indian studios — Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Pune, Mohali, Patna, Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad and Goa — alongside its sister company ReDefine, which is also working on the film.
Why this matters: normally a VFX vendor bids a fixed number of shots against a locked schedule, and every creative change costs the production money it does not want to spend. Here, the producer owns the render farm. That removes the usual commercial friction between “what the director wants” and “what the vendor was paid for,” and it is the only realistic way a project of this shot count gets attempted from India at all. It is the industrial-scale end of the same compute race that has been reshaping consumer hardware — the reason even mainstream laptops now ship with dedicated AI silicon.
DNEG’s Indian film credits already include Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva (which won the National Film Award for Best VFX), Fighter and work on RRR. Ramayana is an order of magnitude beyond any of them.
Three realms, three visual languages
Visual effects supervision sits with Dan Glass, a senior creative leader at DNEG whose credits run from Batman Begins and the Fantastic Beasts films to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. His remit on Ramayana is not one hero creature or one big set piece — it is the design of the entire mythological world.
That world breaks into three distinct rendering problems:
- Ayodhya — a warm, architecturally coherent human kingdom that has to feel physically buildable, because everything else is measured against it.
- Lanka — Ravana’s seat of power, pitched in deep crimson and long shadow. The trailer reads it almost entirely through colour and silhouette, using architecture to encode cosmological corruption rather than announcing it with dialogue.
- The celestial realms — the hardest category, because there is no photographic reference for any of it and no shared audience expectation to anchor against.
Layered on top: digital creatures, the Vanara army, and battle sequences with crowd counts that are the actual render-hour sink on a film like this. Crowd simulation is where budgets die.
Motion capture, and the problem of making Hanuman move
Terry Notary — the movement specialist behind Avatar, the Planet of the Apes trilogy, The Hobbit and the Avengers films — was brought in to handle performance capture and creature movement. His job is the one that quietly decides whether a CG character reads as a person or as an asset: designing a movement vocabulary for the Vanara army and a distinct body language for Hanuman, then coordinating scenes where live performers and digital characters share a frame.
On the capture side, the production has been reported to use Vicon’s Valkyrie camera system running Shōgun software — the same class of hardware used on major Hollywood performance-capture productions. That is a meaningful detail for anyone tracking India’s production-tech stack: this is not a bolt-on mocap vendor, it is a full-scale capture volume integrated into the shoot. The same lineage of motion-tracking research now underpins the physical AI and humanoid robotics push happening outside cinema entirely.
Guy Norris and the case for practical stunts
The counterweight to all that digital work is action director Guy Norris, George Miller’s collaborator on Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa — arguably the most respected practical action unit in the business. Norris is designing the Rama–Ravana confrontations and the Lanka war with real stunt and wire work as the foundation.
This is a deliberate strategy, not a budget compromise. Fully synthetic action sequences flatten out; the human eye is very good at detecting when nothing in a shot has real mass. Shooting practical plates and building the impossible around them is exactly what Fury Road did, and it is why that film still holds up. Whether Ramayana lands the same blend is the open question.
The long haul: 15 months of shooting, ~600 days of post
This is the part that rarely gets written about, and it is the most impressive number in the entire project.
Principal photography began in April 2024 at Film City, Mumbai, and ran until July 2025 — roughly fifteen continuous months, shooting Part 1 and Part 2 back-to-back. Post-production has been reported at approximately 600 days. Add pre-production, previsualisation and asset development ahead of that, and you are looking at a program measured in years, not months, with a fixed and unmovable Diwali release date at the end of it.
Back-to-back shooting is the only economically sane way to do a two-part film at this scale — you build Lanka once, you cast once, you keep the capture volume standing, and you amortise every digital asset across two films instead of one. It is also brutally unforgiving. There is no reshoot window and no second pass at a set that has already been struck.
The first Indian film shot for IMAX
Ramayana carries the “Filmed for IMAX” designation — a first for an Indian production. That is not a marketing sticker. It imposes real constraints on the entire pipeline: certified camera packages, a taller 1.90:1 frame that has to be composed for, higher delivery resolution, and a VFX pipeline that has to render and comp everything at IMAX fidelity rather than upscaling a 2K master.
Practically, it means every crowd sim, every creature groom and every atmospheric element has to survive being projected onto a screen several storeys tall. That decision alone likely accounts for a substantial slice of the post-production budget.
AI dubbing: the genuinely new technology here
The trailer went out in five languages on day one. The film intends to go considerably further, using AI-driven localisation to produce natural lip-sync dubs across regional languages while preserving the original performers’ emotional delivery — a first at this scale in Indian cinema.
For a country with this many theatrical language markets, that is arguably a bigger long-term story than the creature work. Traditional dubbing loses performance nuance and never matches lip movement; if the Ramayana pipeline solves that convincingly, every Indian studio will adopt it within two years. If it lands in the uncanny valley, it becomes a cautionary tale. Either way, it will be the most-watched deployment of the technology to date — and a far higher-stakes test than the AI video and voice tools creators are already using day to day.
Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman, working together for the first time
Two Academy Award-winning composers are sharing score duties — a first-time collaboration between Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman. Production design is handled by Ravi Bansal and Ramsey Avery.
The honest bit: the VFX criticism is real
Not all of the reaction has been reverent. Both the teaser and the trailer drew genuine criticism over the visual effects — particularly around de-ageing work and some crowd and rakshasa designs, with fans posting their own “fixed” versions of specific shots. Given a reported ₹4,000 crore, the scepticism is fair to voice.
Two caveats worth holding, though. First, trailer VFX is almost never final; shots are routinely cut from work-in-progress comps months ahead of delivery, and this film still has a substantial post window left. Second, YouTube compression on a 30-second cut is a genuinely poor sample of what an IMAX print looks like. The verdict on this pipeline gets made in November, on a very large screen — not in a compressed embed.
Ramayana release date
Part 1 targets the Diwali 2026 window, in early-to-mid November 2026, with Sony Pictures handling international distribution outside India. The exact date has moved between late October and early November as IMAX screen availability gets locked, so treat the specific day as provisional until the production confirms it. Part 2 follows at Diwali 2027 and is already in post.
Ranbir Kapoor has hinted at “six hours of epic visuals and epic action sequences” across both parts. No official runtime has been confirmed.
Why a tech site cares about a mythological epic
Strip away the stars and Ramayana is an infrastructure bet. It is India-headquartered capital, run through an Indian-owned Oscar-winning VFX studio, staffed substantially by Indian artists, shot on IMAX-certified hardware, cut with Hollywood’s best movement and action specialists, and shipped globally through a major Hollywood distributor with AI localisation layered on top.
If it works, the argument that tentpole-scale visual effects work has to be outsourced to Los Angeles, London or Wellington gets much harder to make. If it doesn’t, ₹4,000 crore becomes the most expensive proof-of-concept in Indian production history. Either outcome tells us something worth knowing.
November will settle it.
Ramayana (2026) FAQ
When is the Ramayana movie releasing?
Part 1 is set for the Diwali 2026 window — early November 2026 — with a worldwide IMAX release. Part 2 follows at Diwali 2027.
Who is directing Ramayana?
Nitesh Tiwari, the director of Dangal, India’s highest-grossing film.
What is the Ramayana movie budget?
Producer Namit Malhotra has said the combined budget across both parts will be approximately $500 million — over ₹4,000 crore — making it the most expensive Indian film project ever.
Who is doing the VFX for Ramayana?
DNEG, the eight-time Oscar-winning visual effects studio, alongside sister company ReDefine. Dan Glass is the visual effects supervisor. DNEG’s global CEO, Namit Malhotra, is also the film’s producer.
Who is in the Ramayana cast?
Ranbir Kapoor as Ram, Sai Pallavi as Sita, Yash as Ravana, Sunny Deol as Hanuman, Ravi Dubey as Lakshman, Lara Dutta as Kaikeyi, Rakul Preet Singh as Surpanakha, and Arun Govil as King Dashrath.
Who composed the Ramayana music?
Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman, collaborating for the first time.
Is Ramayana in IMAX?
Yes — it is the first Indian film to carry the “Filmed for IMAX” designation, with both parts shot for IMAX exhibition.
Where can I watch the Ramayana teaser?
The official teaser, Ramayana: The Introduction, is embedded at the top of this article and is available on the World Of Ramayana YouTube channel. The full global trailer is on Sony Pictures Entertainment’s channel.
Sources: DNEG, Variety, The Week, Outlook India, Business Today, FirstShowing and Digit. Budget figures are as stated by the producer; other production details are trade-reported and unconfirmed. TechReview.trade will update this piece as the release date and technical specifications are confirmed.
