Ranbir Kapoor is building his exit ramp from full-time movie stardom. The actor announced he wants to step behind the camera within two to three years, describing his current run on screen as his final chapter. "It's my last decade as an actor," Kapoor said during promotional appearances for Ramayana: Part 1 alongside co-star Sai Pallavi. He has already started drafting an original screenplay. He has zero interest in starring in it himself.
The pivot has been brewing for months. While actors inhabit characters piecemeal, directors build entire universes from blank paper—and that distinction eats at Kapoor. "I just started writing a script a couple of months back, and it's so hard to create," he admitted. An actor's high, he argued, remains fleeting and surface-level compared to the rush of steering a production from conception to final cut. "After a musician, if there's somebody who feels a creative high, it's the director. An actor's high is very superficial."
Yet do not expect him to mount an explosive, blood-soaked blockbuster like Animal. Kapoor wants warmth. He is aiming squarely for uplifting, character-driven storytelling in the vein of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, and the crowd-pleasing humanism of Rajkumar Hirani. "I can't define the genre, but I'll tell you all my favourite films—and I hope it comes in that bracket," he noted. "I would say like a feel-good family drama."
The instinct is practically genetic. Filmmaking runs through three generations of his bloodline. His grandfather, Raj Kapoor, established RK Studios at just 24 years old, directing enduring cinematic touchstones like Awaara and Shree 420. Decades later, a teenage Ranbir watched his father, the late Rishi Kapoor, direct Aa Ab Laut Chalen in 1999 as an assistant on set, before doing another tour as an assistant director on Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black. Stepping into the director's chair is not a sudden whim. It is a long-delayed return to where his film education actually started.
But stepping behind the lens requires clearing a mammoth front-of-camera ledger first. Kapoor works an average of 100 to 125 days a year, a rhythm that leaves him wide stretches of downtime to write and bounce concepts off a dedicated writers' room he set up late last year. Even so, his calendar remains booked solid. He reunites with Bhansali alongside Alia Bhatt and Vicky Kaushal for the period romance Love And War, alongside contractual monster sequels: Brahmāstra: Part Two, Animal Park, and the second chapter of Ramayana.
He insists those tentpoles must cross the finish line before he yells cut on his own set. "I really want to get these films done and really get on floors with my directorial debut within two or three years," Kapoor said. If the timeline holds, Bollywood's most bankable leading man will soon trade the vanity of the spotlight for the grinding, all-consuming authority of the director's chair.