The most-subscribed individual on YouTube stood on a stage in Mumbai on Saturday, next to Ranbir Kapoor, and chanted “Jai Shri Ram” to a crowd that lost its mind.
Jimmy Donaldson, who the internet knows as MrBeast, was at the Ramayana event alongside Kapoor, who plays Ram, Sai Pallavi, who plays Sita, Yash, who plays Ravana, Ravi Dubey, who plays Lakshman, director Nitesh Tiwari and producer Namit Malhotra.
He was prompted by someone in the audience, Kapoor helped him with it, and he said afterwards: “It’s been a lot of fun and it is amazing to see part of the film, looks phenomenal.” Reported by ThePrint and The Statesman.
The film releases at Diwali, roughly forty days out.
What Is Actually Being Attempted Here
Indian films have chased international audiences for thirty years and have mostly done it one way: release in the diaspora markets, count the dollars from people who were already going to watch, and call it global.
Ramayana appears to be trying something different, which is reaching an audience that has no prior relationship with Indian cinema at all.
MrBeast is the purest possible instrument for that. His audience is enormous, young, overwhelmingly non-Indian, and almost entirely outside the reach of every conventional Indian film marketing channel. You cannot buy that audience with a trailer on YouTube India or a piece in an American trade paper. They are not there.
Putting him on a stage in Mumbai, getting a clip of him chanting with Ranbir Kapoor, and letting it travel is a targeted attempt at the one demographic Indian cinema has never successfully addressed.
Namit Malhotra Is The Reason This Is Not Absurd
It would be easy to file this as a stunt. The producer’s identity is what makes it something else.
Namit Malhotra runs DNEG, one of the largest visual effects companies in the world, with a shelf of Academy Awards for work on films most of this audience has seen without knowing who made the effects. He is not an Indian producer reaching for international credibility. He is an international production figure making an Indian film.
His framing of the story at the event was characteristically un-devotional: “Ramayana shows you that by giving up everything you still have a lot and on the other side, he (Ravana) is alone despite having everything.”
That is a pitch to somebody who has never heard the story. It is the Ramayana described as a structure rather than as scripture, which is exactly how you would explain it to a fifteen-year-old in Ohio.
What Ranbir Kapoor Said
Kapoor’s line was aimed in a different direction: “Lord Ram is someone who never tried to be hero…I hope through this film you can have introduction to our culture.”
The first half is an actor’s note about playing a character whose defining quality is restraint, which is a real problem for a film that has to be spectacular. The second half is the international pitch again, stated plainly.
The Risk Everyone Is Choosing Not To Discuss
The Ramayana is not a property. It is scripture for a very large number of people, and a contested political symbol for a very large number of people, frequently the same people.
A globally marketed adaptation carrying an enormous budget has two audiences with incompatible expectations. One wants reverence and will read any deviation as an insult. The other wants a film, and will be bored by reverence.
Getting a foreign YouTuber to chant “Jai Shri Ram” on a Mumbai stage is a moment that plays extremely well with the first audience and is completely legible as devotional endorsement. Whether the film itself can hold both audiences for three hours is a much harder problem, and no marketing decision solves it.
The event also, per the reporting, started around 5pm against a scheduled 1:30pm. A three-and-a-half-hour delay at a flagship international-facing event is a small thing that tells you something about the operation.
Forty Days
A Diwali release with forty days to go and the campaign now clearly in its loud phase. Yash in a Hindi film as Ravana is its own substantial draw and has been underplayed in the coverage of this event, which went almost entirely to the American guest.
Which is, presumably, the point.
Bengaluru Baath Take
This is the smartest piece of Indian film marketing this year and it is also slightly embarrassing, and those are not contradictory.
Smart, because it correctly identifies that the international audience Indian cinema wants cannot be reached through any channel Indian cinema currently owns, and goes where that audience actually is.
Embarrassing, because the shape of it is still an Indian production seeking validation by putting a white American on a stage and having the crowd go wild when he says something in an Indian language. That dynamic has a long history here and it has not aged well.
The film will not be judged on any of this. It will be judged on whether Nitesh Tiwari can make the Ramayana move for three hours without either flattening it into a devotional or hollowing it into a fantasy franchise.
Forty days.
Sources
- ThePrint, event details, attendees and full quotes
- The Statesman, MrBeast’s appearance and crowd reaction
- Asianet Newsable, cast and event coverage
- Social News XYZ, global promotion context
