The scale is monstrous. Producer Namit Malhotra took to X to confirm that director Nitesh Tiwari’s upcoming two-part epic, Ramayana: Rise of a Legend, has secured India’s first official “Filmed for IMAX” certification. Mounted on a colossal ₹4,000 crore canvas, the production aims to blast the ancient clash of Rama and Ravana across large-format screens. Malhotra framed the milestone with unabashed ambition: “From INDIA for a BETTER World.”
That badge carries legitimate technical weight. Multiplexes frequently slap an IMAX logo onto routine commercial releases through software upscaling—a post-production trick that merely blows up standard footage. Tiwari bypassed that shortcut. The crew shot the film using IMAX-certified digital cameras, calculating headroom and vertical framing inside the viewfinder rather than stretching digital files in an editing bay.
Yet marketing rhetoric easily blurs technical realities. “Filmed for IMAX” does not mean Tiwari fed physical 15-perforation 70mm celluloid through a camera gate. It does not match the towering 1.43:1 film frame Christopher Nolan champions. True 70mm projection has vanished into a collector's corner of world cinema, with approximately 41 operational commercial venues left worldwide due to crippling print costs and finicky mechanical parts.
Instead, Ramayana leans into certified digital capture engineered for modern dual-laser and single-laser multiplexes. Part 1 adapts the opening three kāṇḍas of Valmiki’s Sanskrit epic, establishing the foundational conflicts between celestial forces and demonic armies. With actor Yash anchoring the antagonist's weight opposite a massive ensemble, the production team has framed every skirmish to exploit taller digital screen real estate without cropping visual information.
Audiences must still contend with varied auditorium architecture across cities. Most domestic multiplex screens rely on standard digital projection rather than wall-to-wall glass. But for a domestic industry long reliant on retrofitted visual formats, Tiwari's certified digital shoot guarantees theatergoers see deliberate visual composition rather than inflated pixels.