Eight years after first announcing a movie on India's first R&AW chief, Karan Johar has locked August 11, 2028 as its theatrical date, with no cast attached yet.
Eight years is a long time to sit on a spy story. Karan Johar picked Sunday to end the wait, announcing on Instagram that his film on Rameshwar Nath Kao, the man who set up India's Research and Analysis Wing, will hit cinemas on August 11, 2028.
The timing wasn't random. Johar's post landed on what he called the 58th anniversary of R&AW's founding, and he used the moment to frame Kao in fairly large terms. "RN Kao - The Man, The Myth, The Legend," he wrote, calling him the founder who "led India to an unprecedented win in the 1971 War against Pakistan." A second post got more specific about the source material: the film is based on Nitin Gokhale's book Gentleman Spymaster, and will apparently cover R&AW's first mission along with its formation.
"He built the invisible...but history remembers his impact," Johar wrote, adding that Kao's story "comes alive on big screens" on the announced date.
What's missing from both posts is everything a trade reporter actually wants to know. No cast, no director attached publicly, no word on who's writing it. Dharma Productions had first announced the project back in January 2020, alongside a company called Still and Still Media Collective, pitching it then as "The Untold Story of the Real Life Indian Spymaster." That's roughly six years between the first press release and any confirmed date, which tells you something about how hard this one has been to get off the ground.
Bollywood Hungama has previously reported, via a scoop, that Dharma approached Hrithik Roshan for the film. Nothing about that casting has been confirmed by Johar himself, and it's worth treating it as exactly that: an approach, not a signed deal. Whether Roshan is still attached, or whether the eight-year gap changed that equation entirely, is one of the bigger open questions here.
A crowded field for one spymaster
Kao isn't short of takers in Indian pop culture right now. Filmmaker Hansal Mehta was announced in 2022 as showrunner for a separate OTT series on Kao, based on R K Yadav's book Mission R&AW. That project hasn't had a real update since, and it's unclear if it's still moving or has quietly stalled while Johar's film gets a release date.
Kao himself ran R&AW from its creation in 1968, under Indira Gandhi's government, until 1977. He's become something of a mythic figure in India's intelligence lore, the sort of subject who invites exactly the kind of grand framing Johar reached for in his announcement.
For now, August 11, 2028 is the only hard fact on the table. That's nearly two years out, plenty of time for Dharma to announce a director, a lead and everything else that turns a release date into an actual film. Until then, this stays a date on a calendar and a book on a shelf.
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