After seven years in the making, Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana: Part 1 opened in cinemas worldwide yesterday, November 5, with Ranbir Kapoor as Rama, Sai Pallavi as Sita and Yash as Ravana leading the most ambitious Indian film ever mounted.
The film is now playing across Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English, with IMAX presentations anchoring a release pitched at a scale Indian cinema has never attempted — a reported 70,000 screens around the world.
Early word from the first screenings is split. Some early reviews call the film a spellbinding spectacle that lives up to its monumental hype, praising Tiwari’s staging and the visual effects crafted by DNEG, while others are more measured, leaving the film with mixed notices on its opening morning. The divide sets up a fascinating opening weekend: the advance booking was already historic, and the question now is whether audiences embrace the film the way the pre-release numbers suggested they would.
There is one more surprise waiting in the theatre. Sunny Deol, who plays Hanuman, makes his entry during the film’s end credits — a moment the makers kept under wraps until opening day. The score, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between A. R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer recorded with an orchestra at London’s AIR Studios, underpins a two-part telling that continues with Part 2, planned for Diwali 2027.
