"Ramayana: Rise of a Legend" opened in cinemas on Thursday, days before Diwali, and took more than $55 million worldwide over its opening weekend, including $12.2 million in the United States. Part one is reported to have cost about $250 million, with a second part still to come. That makes it the most expensive Indian film production ever mounted.
It is tempting to read those numbers as a simple bet on a bigger Marvel-style spectacle. They are also, and more importantly, a bet on something less visible: whether India can turn a sacred epic into a repeatable global screen franchise, and whether a film can be a national project without becoming a sectarian one.
The arithmetic of a national tentpole
Start with the cold facts. The most any Indian film has earned at the global box office is $304 million, a figure set by "Dangal" in 2016. That film, also directed by Nitesh Tiwari, took 64 per cent of its total in China. "Ramayana" is being talked about as India's answer to "Avatar" or "The Lord of the Rings", and it will need to perform like one.
Its opening weekend puts it on course to join India's highest-grossing films, though it now looks unlikely to match "Dhurandhar: The Revenge", which took $115.3 million worldwide in its first week in March. The comparison is slightly unfair, because "Dhurandhar" was not carrying a two-part production bill. Still, it shows how high the domestic bar has risen.
The producer, Namit Malhotra, is relaxed about the maths, at least in public. He is funding the project himself, and he talks about a chain of returns that begins with cinemas and continues through merchandise and a theme park. "If we don't make money with the movies, we'll make it in the merchandise. If we don't make it in the merchandise, we'll make it in the theme park," he said. "This is the story of Lord Ram. There is no version of this where people don't like it and it does not drive economic upside."
That is either supreme confidence or the necessary optimism of a man who has already spent the money. Probably both.
Not Bollywood, India
The most deliberate decision in the film is the casting. Ranbir Kapoor, a Hindi-language star, plays Rama. Yash, who works in Kannada cinema and also co-produced, plays Ravana. Sai Pallavi, known in Tamil and Telugu films, plays Sita. The score is shared by Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman. The effects are by DNEG, the British studio behind this year's "The Odyssey" and "Dune: Part Three".
Malhotra has been explicit about why. "Ramayana is every Indian's story," he said, explaining that the aim was to make the film feel as if it comes from India first, rather than from Bollywood. It is a commercial strategy as much as a cultural one: a pan-Indian cast can sell tickets in several language markets at once, and it defuses the complaint that a national epic has been captured by one region's film industry.
Joyojeet Pal, a professor of information at the University of Michigan, sees the logic clearly. He points out that much of the current discourse around nationalist films argues that they present a sectarian view of India, dominated by a North Indian, Hindu-oriented narrative. A pan-Indian presentation is valuable as branding precisely because it answers that charge.
There is a complication, and it is built into the story. In the dominant northern version, Ravana is the demon king. In parts of the south, he is remembered as a heroic or learned figure. Casting a major southern star as Ravana is a commercial decision, but it also quietly acknowledges that the epic does not mean one thing across the country. Whether the film can hold both readings at once is one of its more interesting tests.
The religious risk
The directors know what is at stake. "We ourselves are believers," Tiwari said. "When you have the sensibilities of billions of people attached to an epic, you have to tread very cautiously." The screenplay draws on the two most popular versions of the Ramayana while taking elements from others, and he insists that everything comes from the scriptures.
Recent history shows what happens when that care is seen to fail. In 2023 the big-budget "Adipurush" was rejected by audiences and drew public backlash. A film made for a mass audience can survive bad reviews; it struggles to survive the perception that it has disrespected a god.
Ranbir Kapoor's own hesitation speaks to the same pressure. He described the responsibility as daunting and said he was reluctant to take the role, worried about whether the audience would accept him after eighteen years of playing other parts. "There will always be a conversation, like, 'He's not fit to play this part,'" he said. He signed on because the chance to be part of a story his culture worships was unlikely to come again.
That is a useful reminder that in this genre the audience is not a market to be captured. It is a co-author with veto power.
The mythological turn
"Ramayana" is arriving in the middle of a broader shift. Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" brought Homer to cinemas this summer. The Chinese animation "Ne Zha 2", drawn from Chinese mythology, became the highest-grossing film of 2025, taking $2.2 billion in China alone. Its run was helped by a Lunar New Year release, reports that companies booked screenings for employees, and subsidised tickets.
The Chinese case is often cited as proof that a domestic mythology can produce a global-scale hit. It is also a reminder that the model depended on a very particular set of conditions: a vast home market, a holiday release window, and institutional support that pushed the film beyond ordinary audience demand. India has the home market. Whether it has the same willingness to mobilise around a film is a different question.
What these films have in common is not just scale. It is the decision to treat mythology as intellectual property: a library of characters and stories that can be developed, sequelised and exported. Hollywood has done this with superheroes for two decades. China has now done it with its own cosmology. "Ramayana" is India's attempt to do the same with a text that is older than all of them.
The export test
The film's biggest unknown is not India. It is everywhere else. The opening weekend included $12.2 million in the United States, a strong figure that will still be dominated by diaspora audiences. The question is whether the film can reach viewers with no prior relationship to the story.
The English-language version is part of the answer. The actors recorded their lines in English, and motion capture and artificial intelligence were used to match mouth and facial movements to the new speech, so that the release does not look like a conventional dub. The work was overseen by Brahma AI, part of DNEG Group, and took more than a year and millions of dollars. The actors' voices are their own, not synthesised.
It is a serious attempt to solve a real problem. Subtitles are a barrier for a mass audience; dubbing often feels like a barrier of a different kind. A version that looks and sounds native removes one excuse for staying away.
Sai Pallavi put the ambition simply. "In India we love world cinema," she said. "So, it'll be nice if it's the other way around."
What success would actually mean
There are three tests, and they are not the same. The first is financial: can the two parts recoup their cost? The second is industrial: can an Indian studio build a franchise that other films can be made inside? The third is cultural: can a Hindu epic travel as a story rather than as a curiosity or a community event?
The first will be settled by box office returns and merchandising. The second will be settled by what gets greenlit in the next two years. The third is slower, and it will be settled by viewers who have never heard of Valmiki and who decide, somewhere in a cinema in Manchester or Lagos or Seoul, that the flying palace is worth their attention.
Malhotra's wager is that belief in the story is enough. "To me, there's one fundamental truth: that if we do 'Ramayana' well, and if people like it, financially we'll be fine," he said. The interesting word in that sentence is "well". Everything else follows from it.
