Mumbai: Ramayana has not opened yet and it has already sold 25.65 lakh tickets. A day before its Thursday release, Nitesh Tiwari's two-part adaptation has logged Rs 96.56 crore in advance bookings including blocked seats, according to trade figures, and about Rs 77.31 crore without them.
Hindi is doing the heavy lifting. Bookings in the language stand at Rs 78.88 crore, roughly 82% of the total. Telugu has added Rs 8.09 crore, Kannada Rs 7.27 crore, Tamil Rs 1.84 crore and Malayalam Rs 49.23 lakh — a spread that says less about southern demand than about how completely the Hindi belt has claimed this one.
The film stars Ranbir Kapoor as Rama, Sai Pallavi as Sita and Yash as Ravana, with Namit Malhotra producing. A special premiere was held in Mumbai on Tuesday night, attended by the cast and a long line of industry names, and the photographs did the marketing by themselves.
The advance numbers have already overtaken the opening-day bookings of Kapoor's Animal, which was the benchmark until now. For a mythological epic in a market that has been cool on big-budget Hindi films for two years, that is the story. Exhibitors who had written off the season are adding shows.
Part 1 arrives on Thursday, days ahead of Diwali, when families go to the movies in the largest numbers of the year. The second part is not due until 2028, which means this film has to stand on its own rather than as the first half of something.
What the trade will watch on Friday morning is not the opening number, which is now a formality, but the drop on Monday. A film that opens on devotion and holds on word of mouth behaves very differently from one that opens on hype and collapses.
One caveat worth keeping in the copy: advance booking totals in India are compiled by tracking services from booked seats and reported rates, not from the producers' books.