Namit Malhotra isn't thinking small. The producer behind the upcoming screen adaptation of the Ramayana has a message for anyone who assumes a Sanskrit epic can't stand shoulder to shoulder with the biggest spectacles Hollywood rolls out every summer: think again. In his view, the tools, talent and technology that built the Marvel machine are no longer a Hollywood birthright - and if the West can turn myth into a global franchise, India can do exactly the same with one of the oldest stories humanity has ever told.
"If Hollywood can do it, we can too," Malhotra said, framing the Ramayana as a story with the kind of scale, emotion and built-in audience that studios spend fortunes trying to manufacture from scratch. His pitch is less about chasing Hollywood and more about recognizing that the infrastructure gap has closed. The visual-effects pipelines, the sound stages, the crews trained on tentpole productions - much of that expertise now lives and works in India. What's been missing, in his telling, isn't capability. It's the ambition to point all of it at a story this enormous.
Bringing a Three-Thousand-Year-Old Epic to the Multiplex
The Ramayana needs no introduction to audiences across South Asia and its diaspora, but Malhotra's bet is that it needs one for a huge chunk of the global moviegoing public. The epic follows Prince Rama, exiled from his kingdom, who sets out with his brother Lakshmana and his wife Sita through forests and across oceans, battles the ten-headed demon king Ravana and his army, and ultimately reclaims what was taken from him. It's a road movie, a war movie, a love story and a family saga stitched into one narrative, complete with a supporting cast of monkeys, bears and flying chariots that would make any effects supervisor salivate.
That's the commercial logic behind the producer's confidence. Hollywood has spent two decades proving that audiences will show up for larger-than-life mythology if it's packaged with craft and conviction. The Ramayana arrives with something those franchises had to build from the ground up: centuries of storytelling, iconography and devotion already embedded in the culture. Malhotra's argument is essentially that the material is the easy part - the hard part is execution at a level that satisfies both the faithful and the uninitiated.
Taking On the Weight of Expectations
Of course, adapting the Ramayana is not a casual undertaking. For hundreds of millions of people, it isn't just a story - it's scripture. Generations have grown up with these characters through temple recitations, television serials, comic books and festival reenactments, and every viewer carries a mental image of Rama, Sita and Hanuman that no casting director can fully match. Get it wrong and the backlash writes itself; get it right and you've tapped into something far deeper than a typical blockbuster.
Malhotra seems to understand that the stakes are cultural as much as financial. His framing suggests a production that aims to honor the text while deploying every modern filmmaking trick available - the kind of balancing act that, done well, can turn a regional epic into a worldwide event. The comparison to Hollywood isn't really about imitation. It's about refusing to accept that spectacle is something that only gets made in Los Angeles.
A Bigger Point About India's Place on the Global Stage
There's a broader statement buried in that quote, and it's hard to miss. Malhotra's career has been built partly on building bridges between Indian cinema and the global visual-effects industry, and his Ramayana talk fits a moment when Indian filmmakers are openly asking why their biggest stories shouldn't command the same worldwide rollout as anything starring a cape. The audience is there - diaspora communities fill theaters from London to Toronto to Sydney, and streaming has made Indian storytelling a genuinely global habit. What's changing is the scale of ambition behind the camera.
Whether the Ramayana ultimately delivers on that ambition is a question only audiences will answer, and no amount of producer confidence can pre-empt the verdict. But the sentiment itself is telling. Malhotra is saying out loud what a lot of people in the industry have been thinking: the gap between Hollywood and everyone else is narrowing fast, and the next era of event cinema might not be set in a galaxy far, far away. It might be set in a forest, on a bridge being built stone by stone, with an army of monkeys on the march. If that isn't a global spectacle waiting to happen, nothing is.
Source: NDTV