🎞️ The Ramayana VFX Backlash, Explained — Is the Criticism Fair?

Within hours of the Ramayana trailer going live on 30 July, a specific complaint hardened across social media: the CGI looked cheap. For a film reported at $500 million, made by a VFX house with eight Academy Awards, that is a genuinely strange sentence to have to write. Here's what's actually going on.

By the numbers

What people actually objected to

The criticism was narrower than "the VFX is bad." Two things drew nearly all of it:

Kumbhakarna. The giant appears briefly, and viewers described the shot as lacking texture and physical weight — the specific quality that makes something enormous feel enormous rather than merely large. Scale is one of the hardest things in visual effects, and it's where the eye is least forgiving.

The demon armies. Crowd simulation shots were called flat and short on depth. Massed digital characters are notoriously difficult to make convincing, because the brain reads repetition instantly.

Notably, almost nobody criticised the environments, the production design, or the photography. The complaint was creature and crowd work specifically.

The case that the criticism is unfair

Trailer VFX is nearly always unfinished. Marketing cuts get assembled months ahead of release, and the shots in them are pulled at whatever completion state they happen to be at. Creature work and crowd simulation are among the last things finalised in any pipeline, because they depend on lighting and layout being locked first. The shots that drew fire are precisely the categories you would expect to be least finished.

A four-minute trailer is not a proof of quality. Compression on a YouTube stream at scale, viewed on a phone, is not the medium these shots were built for. Kumbhakarna is an IMAX shot being judged on a 6-inch screen.

DNEG's track record is not in doubt. This is the house that did Interstellar's black hole and both Dune films. The technical capability question is settled.

The case that the criticism is fair

Studios choose their trailer shots. Nobody puts an embarrassing shot in the first full trailer for a $500M film. If Kumbhakarna is in the cut, someone approved it — which means either it's near-final, or the marketing was so short on finished creature work that they had to use it anyway. Both readings are unflattering.

The budget set the standard. Namit Malhotra put the ₹4,000 crore figure into the public conversation himself. Once you claim a record budget, you're judged against it. A shot that would pass without comment on a ₹200cr film gets scrutinised at twenty times the price.

There is no external check. This is the structural point most coverage misses: Malhotra is both the producer and the CEO of the VFX house doing the work. On a normal production, the studio pushes back on the vendor when a shot isn't ready. Here, those are the same person. That's a real governance gap, and we go into it in his track record.

100 days is a real constraint. It's enough to finish shots in the pipeline, improve lighting, texture and grade, and polish. It is not enough to redesign a creature or re-simulate every crowd sequence. Whatever the fundamental design decisions are, they're locked.

Our read

The criticism is overstated as a verdict and legitimate as a warning.

Overstated, because trailer creature work is genuinely unrepresentative and this specific studio has earned the benefit of the doubt eight times over. A large share of the people declaring the film's effects a failure have made that call from a compressed video on a phone, three months out.

Legitimate, because the shots were chosen, the budget was publicised by the producer, and the usual independent check between studio and vendor doesn't exist here. "It'll be fixed by release" is an assumption, and at this cost it's an expensive one to be wrong about.

The most likely outcome is unglamorous: the final film looks substantially better than the trailer, and still doesn't look like $500 million, because $500 million spread across two parts and thousands of effects shots buys less per shot than the headline implies.

What to watch next

• A second trailer closer to release. If Kumbhakarna reappears looking materially better, the pipeline argument was right. If he's absent, that tells you something too.
• Whether the IMAX marketing leans on creature shots. Studios lead with their strongest material in premium-format promotion.
• Reviews from the first premium screenings. Effects criticism from people who saw it in the intended format is the only version that settles this.

Full trailer analysis is in our shot-by-shot breakdown; the budget confusion driving the outrage is in the ₹4,000 crore question.

The full film hub is at Ramayana.

DNEG's credit list: dneg.com.