Ramayana’s Ravana-Jatayu Fight Took 6.5 Years to Finish

When the Ravana-Jatayu duel finally unspools in Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana, it will carry an invisible timeline of six and a half years. The director has revealed that this one action sequence ran from his first briefing to an artist all the way to the final frame — a production arc that outlasted many entire films.

Why one fight took years

Tiwari, speaking to Shreyas Media, said the sequence took “six and a half years” from brief to finish. He added that thousands of people worked on it because everything had to be shaped from scratch.

The slowest piece was the Pushpak Viman. The team spent close to two years locking the mythical aircraft’s design, working through 40 to 50 versions before choosing the one seen in the film. That final choice upended the fight.

• 6.5 years: total time from the first briefing to the final frame of the Ravana-Jatayu fight.
• 2 years: time spent on the Pushpak Viman design before it was locked.
• 40–50 designs: iterations created before the filmmakers settled on the final aircraft.

Because the finished Pushpak Viman looked completely different from the original concept, Tiwari said the fight sequence had to be reworked again and again. The team wasn’t chasing a vehicle that simply looked as if it could fly; they wanted a design with some logic behind it. “We all believe there was science behind everything that happened that time,” he said.

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That human labour is the real subtext of Tiwari’s timeline. A six-and-a-half-year action beat is a reminder that the film’s spectacle is being assembled frame by frame, not generated by a prompt.

Why the detail matters for fans

For Hindi film audiences, epic retellings live or die on whether their world feels credible. Tiwari’s insistence on science and repeated iteration signals that Ramayana is being built as world-building rather than quick spectacle. Patience on this scale may be what the story needs, because the Pushpak Viman and the aerial battle are lore audiences carry into the theatre, not just trailer moments.

The first part of Ramayana is slated for Diwali 2026, with Sai Pallavi as Sita and Yash as Ravana opposite Ranbir’s Rama. The second part is planned for 2027. If the film lands with the detail Tiwari describes, the Ravana-Jatayu duel may become the sequence fans replay long after the credits.

Source: The Times of India