The actor's first-look poster from Love & War shows him behind the wheel with blood on his fingers, nearly two decades after his debut in Bhansali's Saawariya.
There's a car, a steering wheel, and a hand hanging out the window with blood on it. That's the first image Sanjay Leela Bhansali chose to release from Love & War, and it's Ranbir Kapoor's face doing the talking, half-hidden behind sunglasses and a moustache.
Bhansali Productions put the poster up on Instagram with a caption that leaned into old-school swagger: "Woh rutba, woh raub, woh junoon!" No dialogue, no title card beyond the release date. Just Kapoor, road-ready and roughed up.
The timing matters more than it might look. This is Kapoor's first film with Bhansali since Saawariya, the 2007 debut that put him on screens for the first time. Nineteen years later, he's back working with the same director, this time as part of an ensemble that also has Alia Bhatt and Vicky Kaushal.
For Bhatt, it's a second round with Bhansali after Gangubai Kathiawadi in 2022. For Kaushal, it's new ground entirely, his first collaboration with the filmmaker. Kapoor and Bhatt have shared screen space before, but never inside a Bhansali frame, and that's presumably part of why the studio is treating this poster drop like an event.
Alia Bhatt and Vicky Kaushal both reposted the image on their own pages within hours, which tells you the marketing rollout is coordinated rather than incidental. No poster for either of them yet. That's presumably coming, one character reveal at a time, the way these campaigns tend to build.
What we know about the film itself is thin by design. Bhansali is calling it an epic set against war, and beyond that the plot details haven't surfaced. What's confirmed is the release plan: January 21, 2027, in theatres worldwide, with versions in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. That's a wide, deliberate push for a Bhansali film, which historically has leaned hard on Hindi-belt audiences and Mumbai-set stories.
Comments under the poster ran the usual gamut of enthusiasm, fans calling Kapoor's look a comeback moment and dwelling on the blood-streaked hand as evidence something violent sits at the centre of this story. Bhansali's period dramas rarely stay gentle for long, so that reading isn't a stretch.
The bigger question now is sequencing. With a January 2027 date locked in, the studio has roughly four months to release character posters for Bhatt and Kaushal, drop a teaser, and start building toward a trailer. Given how Bhansali projects usually move, expect the gaps between reveals to be calculated rather than accidental. Next up, most likely, is Bhatt's look, and then Kaushal's, before anyone gets a proper trailer to chew on.
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