Ramayana Gets a Los Angeles World Premiere at the Academy Museum on October 27

Bollywood’s biggest Diwali bet is going Hollywood first. The makers of Ramayana: Rise of Legend, the two-part mythological epic starring Ranbir Kapoor and Yash, have scheduled the film’s world premiere for the evening of October 27, 2026, at the David Geffen Theatre of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The invite-only screening will be shown in 3D, with the 945-seat auditorium expected to fill to capacity with Hollywood personalities, filmmakers, international journalists and members of the film fraternity. In a festive cross-cultural touch, guests have been asked to arrive on the red carpet in traditional Indian festive wear as the Diwali season begins.

The premiere arrives just over a week before the film’s worldwide theatrical release on November 5, 2026, and early demand looks serious. Advance bookings opened in the United States on October 15 through platforms like Fandango, offering premium IMAX and 3D formats. As of October 19, worldwide advance bookings have crossed USD 820,000, with more than USD 500,000 of that coming from North America alone, according to LatestLY. That tally comes before the film’s most important market has even opened its box office: Indian advance bookings begin on Dussehra, October 20 — and that first day’s numbers will be the real signal of how far this wave can travel.

The scale of the ambition shows in the credits. The film is directed by Nitesh Tiwari and produced by Namit Malhotra’s Prime Focus Studios in collaboration with DNEG and Yash’s Monster Mind Creations. Ranbir Kapoor plays Ram, Sai Pallavi plays Sita, Yash plays Ravana, Sunny Deol plays Hanuman and Ravie Dubey plays Lakshman. Behind the camera, two Oscar-winning composers — Hans Zimmer and A R Rahman — are collaborating for the first time, and the visual effects come from DNEG, which has won the Academy Award for visual effects eight times. The film will release in Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and English with IMAX formats, and Sony Pictures is overseeing distribution outside India.

Why this matters goes beyond one premiere. An Academy-owned venue — the same museum that hosted this weekend’s Academy Museum Gala where Taylor Swift performed — is now being used to introduce an Indian epic to a global audience, and that is a deliberate statement of intent. The Zimmer-Rahman pairing and DNEG’s VFX pedigree make this look less like a conventional Bollywood release and more like a global franchise launch, built to play as comfortably in Los Angeles as in Lucknow. Indian trade press has put the two-part saga’s estimated budget at INR 4,000 crore (about USD 420 million), which would make it among the most expensive Indian films ever attempted — and a Los Angeles premiere at an Oscar-adjacent institution is exactly the kind of marketing such a bet demands.

What to watch next: the reviews that emerge from the October 27 premiere, the pace of Indian advance bookings once they open on October 20, and whether the Diwali release converts this pre-sale momentum into a record global opening for Indian cinema. The second chapter is already dated for Diwali 2027. For more star stories and bios, browse our Did You Know collection.