The Baahubali and RRR director says decades of disappointment with screen versions of the Ramayana pushed him to attempt his own, inside a bigger adventure starring Mahesh Babu and Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
SS Rajamouli isn't shy about calling Varanasi his most ambitious film, and he's finally explained why. In comments to Track Tollywood, the director said he has sat through plenty of Ramayana and Mahabharata adaptations across Telugu and other Indian languages over the years, and none of them have quite matched what he pictured in his head.
"While there have been some great moments that I truly loved, I was never fully satisfied with how these epics were presented on screen," Rajamouli said. "I always felt that the scale needed to be much bigger and grander, and that there was so much more that could be explored and brought to life on screen."
That's not a small thing coming from the man behind Baahubali and RRR. He's talked for years about wanting to make a Mahabharata film someday. Varanasi, as it turns out, is where he first gets to put a piece of that ambition on screen, through a Ramayana episode built into a much larger story.
"With Varanasi, I now have the opportunity to explore an episode from the Ramayana," he said. "I have to deliver not just grandeur and a much bigger scale, but also larger-than-life emotions for the characters."
He went further, framing it almost as unfinished business. "I keep reminding myself that, after all these years of feeling unsatisfied with how these epics have been presented, I now have the responsibility to show what I believe they truly deserve. That is the challenge I have set for myself, and that is why Varanasi is my most ambitious film ever."
Here's the twist, though. The Ramayana stretch isn't the whole movie. "The Ramayana episode is only one part of the film," Rajamouli said. "There is so much more to Varanasi beyond that, which takes the ambition of this project to an entirely different level. The scale of what we are attempting is truly massive." He also said the film finally lets him make the kind of adventure story he's wanted to direct for a long time.
Going by what's been shown so far, Varanasi is being pitched as a globetrotting adventure jumping across timelines, with the Ramayana portion sitting as one of its centrepiece sequences, not the spine of the plot.
The cast carries its own weight. Mahesh Babu plays Rudhra and also takes on the role of Lord Rama inside the Ramayana segment, marking his first film with Rajamouli. Priyanka Chopra Jonas plays Mandakini, and Prithviraj Sukumaran is the antagonist, Kumbha. MM Keeravani is scoring the music, and Rajamouli has written the story with his father, V. Vijayendra Prasad, who's co-written most of his biggest films.
The title was unveiled at a big event in Hyderabad back in November 2025, and Varanasi is currently slated for a worldwide release on April 7, 2027, including in IMAX.
What happens next is the hard part. Rajamouli has set himself a bar he's publicly called unsatisfied with for years. Whether Mahesh Babu's stretch as Rama clears that bar is something nobody can answer until the film actually lands in 2027.
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