- The film will be released on November 5
- Ranbir Kapoor plays Lord Rama
- Namit Malhotra has co-produced the film.
It's the Ramayana week. The much-awaited Nitesh Tiwari film will release on November 5. The film stars Ranbir Kapoor as Lord Rama, Sai Pallavi as Sita, and Ravie Dubey as Lakshman. Ever since the film was announced, the question that made headlines was “why another adaptation?”
Now, producer Namit Malhotra has said that the intention behind the project is to present the age-old story on a scale audiences have never witnessed before.
Speaking to news agency PTI, Malhotra admitted that many people in India have questioned the decision to make another adaptation when the story is already widely known.
"In India, there are a lot of questions like, 'Why are they making the Ramayana when there have been so many Ramayanas? We already know the story.' And I'm like, 'Listen, we're making it because we want to show you the version of this story that you have never seen,'" he said.
Explaining his vision, the producer said that no television show, street play or Ram Leela had presented the epic with the kind of scale and spectacle that the upcoming film aims to achieve. He compared the ambition behind the project to major international franchises and films such as Avatar, Avengers, Spider-Man and The Odyssey.
“No television show, no street play, no Ram Leela has ever shown you the Ramayana on this scale and with this spectacle that we are making...Much like an Avatar or an Avengers movie or think about Spider-Man or The Odyssey. We are putting Ramayana right up there next to all of those spectacles," Namit Malhotra added.
Malhotra also spoke about the film's larger ambition of establishing Indian cinema as a force in the global spectacle-film space.
Namit added, “If you think about the West, they are the most potent audience for anything that's got a grand epic spectacle. And that's just not how Indian films have been made. So while India makes terrific Indian movies, whether it is 'Baahubali', 'Dhurandhar', or any of the big, super-duper hit films, they are not spectacles the way Hollywood thinks of spectacles. We are first trying to narrow that gap down and saying, 'If you can do it, we can do it too.' There is no reason for us to have any discrepancy. So, every person in Hollywood should acknowledge that India can also do something as good, if not bigger, than what they do.”
Ramayana is being produced by Namit Malhotra's Prime Focus Studios in association with Yash's Monster Mind Creations, with visual effects work involving DNEG, the Oscar-winning visual effects studio.
The film is set to release in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.