Ramayana Trailer 2 Puts Ranbir Kapoor's Rama Against Yash's Ravana

The second trailer for Ramayana landed on Thursday, and it leaves no doubt about the fight at the centre of the film. Ranbir Kapoor's Rama is presented not as a god but as a man, humanity's one hope against Yash's Ravana, as Sony Pictures International opened the global campaign for Nitesh Tiwari's two-part epic.

What the new trailer shows

The footage is set in a time when, the narration says, men walked among gods and evil rose out of darkness. Ravana declares that every head will bow before him. The trailer gives audiences a first look at Kunal Kapoor as Indra, king of the gods, riding his celestial elephant Airavata, before Ravana strikes the animal and sends it crashing to the ground, a short scene built to show a threat that reaches beyond the mortal world. It ends on Rama, who warns that if he does not stop Ravana the world will fall, and that this is just the beginning.

A global push for an Indian epic

For international audiences the film is titled Ramayana: Rise of a Legend. Sony Pictures, which acquired the worldwide distribution rights earlier this year, is leading the rollout outside India, and the makers backed the trailer with a grand launch in Bengaluru, Yash's home turf, hosted by Prime Focus Studios and his company Monster Mind Creations. Producer Namit Malhotra wrote on Wednesday night that the team had always dreamed of taking one of India's greatest stories to the world, and that the international campaign was another big step in that direction. The first trailer, released in July, introduced Kapoor as Rama, Sai Pallavi as Sita and Yash as Ravana.

The film

Directed by Nitesh Tiwari, Ramayana is produced by Namit Malhotra's Prime Focus Studios together with the visual effects house DNEG and Monster Mind Creations. The cast includes Ravie Dubey as Lakshman, Sunny Deol as Hanuman, Arun Govil as Dashrath and Lara Dutta as Kaikeyi. The score brings together Hans Zimmer and A. R. Rahman, a pairing that underlines the scale the makers are aiming at, and the film has been designed for IMAX and other large formats. Trade reports put the running time at three hours and 15 minutes, and the film carries a PG-13 rating in the United States. Part one opens in cinemas worldwide on November 5, 2026, and in India it will screen in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. The second part is planned for Diwali 2027.

The reaction

Early reaction online split along a familiar line. Fans praised the cast and the scale, with some calling the footage a high point for Indian film spectacle, while others said parts of the visual effects still look unfinished and argued about whether the shots are ready for a film of this size. With three weeks to go before release, the argument itself is doing a share of the marketing.