Mahesh Bhatt skipped the red-carpet flashbulbs. On November 3, while Alia Bhatt, Neetu Singh, and Soni Razdan swept into the Mumbai premiere of Ramayana, Bhatt chose anonymity. He slipped into an ordinary cinema hall among paying strangers. He wanted the raw, unvarnished crowd reaction—and he got it.
Nitesh Tiwari’s mythological spectacle stormed the Indian box office on opening day, raking in ₹65 crore net. Yet Bhatt’s immediate focus was not on opening receipts or the reported ₹4,000 crore scale bankrolled by Namit Malhotra and Yash. His attention was trained squarely on the screen, dissecting performances with the cool skepticism of an industry veteran who has spent five decades behind the lens.
Yash’s Ravana struck Bhatt as genuinely magnetic, while Sai Pallavi’s Sita provided what he termed welcome emotional relief. But Ranbir Kapoor’s entrance as Rama did not instantly convince him. The frame felt heavy. The stakes hung unresolved.
"Nitesh Tiwari reins in all that power; it could so easily have become too much," Bhatt explained, recounting the turning point that shattered his reservations. "I was still under its spell when Ranbir entered, and the film did not immediately rise for me with his arrival. Then he walked towards the camera and folded his hands. I saw him touch something in himself that his other films had never asked him to. I felt he had touched the God in him."
The emotional dam broke just before the interval, when Rama accepts his 14-year exile to the Dandakaranya forest. Bhatt felt his throat close up. Surrounded by a crew of younger writers and filmmakers who recognized him in the dark, the director fought to keep his composure. He failed.
"I tried hard not to cry," Bhatt recalled. "When the lights came on, I tried to hide my tears. I couldn’t. Nor could I say much. Great experiences make you silent." He singled out Arun Govil's brief, searing turn within the family assembly as "heartbreakingly total."
The ambitious adaptation splits the ancient Valmiki epic across two expansive chapters. With the first film now running in cinemas nationwide, the production unit turns its calendar toward Diwali 2027, when Yash and Kapoor will stage the concluding war for Lanka.