Why every founder should know the connection between The Odyssey and Ramayana

There is something almost poetic about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
latest production (pun intended). It is one of the biggest cinematic productions in the world. The scale is enormous. The technology behind it is extraordinary. First film shot completely on IMAX 70mm camera

The visual effects are created by a company called DNEG - the company behind Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Dune and Dune: Part Two.

This is where our story begins. It starts in a much less glamorous place. A garage in Mumbai.

In 1997, a 21-year-old Namit Malhotra started Prime Focus.

At the time, this was not some Silicon Valley-style startup with venture capital, a pitch deck and a grand plan to conquer Hollywood. It was a tiny business operating in an emerging Indian media industry.

The numbers tell you how small it was. Prime Focus had around ₹75 lakh in turnover against ₹2 crore of debt.

Namit made what he himself described as the biggest risk of his life. He borrowed more money to buy technology and equipment worth roughly three times the company’s revenue. He put his family’s only house in Mumbai on the line.

That decision tells you something important about the story that followed.
Malhotra wasn’t simply building a post-production company. He was betting that technology would fundamentally change how entertainment was produced.

At first, Prime Focus did what small Indian media companies did - sell where you can and survive - Television, advertising, music videos and post-production. They worked with MTV. They became Channel V’s in-house design team. Their facilities ran around the clock. The business was scrappy because it had to be.

But there was an unusual ambition underneath it.

The first big leap

The entertainment industry was moving from analogue to digital. Visual effects were becoming increasingly important.

VFX from Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan

3D was becoming commercially viable. Post-production was no longer simply about editing film. It was becoming technology.

Prime Focus leaned into that. The company listed on the Indian stock exchanges in 2006. It began looking outside India.

And this is where the story gets interesting.

Instead of trying to build every capability organically, Prime Focus started buying and partnering its way into the global market.

One of its most consequential moves came in 2014.

Prime Focus acquired Double Negative (aka DNEG) the London-based visual effects company that had already worked on films including Inception and Interstellar.

DNEG is one of the world’s premier visual-effects studios. This was the moment when the Indian company and the British VFX powerhouse came together. DNEG has won eight Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects since 2011.

It operates across 19 studios globally, including London, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Chennai, Montréal, Bengaluru, Sydney and several other locations.

Prime Focus now owns 92.54% of DNEG on fully diluted basis

From The Odyssey trailer

In 2026, DNEG is the sole VFX partner for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Think about that for a second.

A company that started with a ₹75 lakh business in Mumbai eventually became the visual-effects partner behind one of Hollywood’s most ambitious directors.

The numbers make the transformation even more interesting. DNEG reported approximately $425.7 million of revenue in FY25. Prime Focus itself reported ₹3,599 crore of consolidated revenue in FY25 with ₹1,027 Crs in EBIDTA.

You’re looking at the evolution of an Indian media company that spent decades building, acquiring and consolidating capabilities across the global entertainment value chain.

But there is one more twist (just like our movies)

Namit Malhotra isn’t stopping at making other people’s movies look spectacular. He’s now making his own.

Enter Ramayana.

The two-part epic is being produced by Prime Focus Studios, in association with DNEG and Monster Mind Creations. It is directed by Nitesh Tiwari.

Ranbir Kapoor plays Rama. Yash plays Ravana. Sai Pallavi plays Sita. Sunny Deol plays Hanuman. Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman are collaborating on the music.

The film is being made for IMAX.

The same entrepreneur who started with a ₹2 Crore business in a Mumbai garage is now producing Ramayana a two-part global-scale film being made by Prime Focus Studios, with DNEG and ReDefine handling the visual effects.

Big win for Namit to bring two ancient epics in modern cinematic universes.

There’s a rather remarkable circle here:

Mumbai garage → listed Indian company → Hollywood VFX powerhouse → Nolan’s The Odyssey → now building Ramayana for the world.

Perhaps the bigger lesson isn’t about movies at all.

This is what happens when an Indian company doesn’t stop at just being the cheaper service provider. In other words, the man who once sold visual-effects and post-production services is now attempting something much harder: owning the story and going full out on the value chain.

There is a natural progression hiding inside the Prime Focus story.

First, you sell services. Then you build technology. Then you acquire capabilities. Then you build a global network. Then you become part of the biggest productions in the world.

And eventually, you move upstream and vertically intergrate.

From service provider → technology company → VFX powerhouse → content producer → IP owner.

That is where the economics of the business can fundamentally change. A services company gets paid to execute someone else’s vision. A content company takes a risk on the vision itself.

To founders who read till the end

We tend to romanticise successful entrepreneurs by looking backwards.

Once someone is running a global company, the origin story starts sounding inevitable. A 21-year-old with ₹2 crore of debt did not look like the future CEO of a global VFX company.

Buying technology worth several times your revenue certainly didn’t look conservative. Trying to compete internationally from India didn’t look obvious.

Acquiring a world-class London VFX company didn’t look like the natural next step for an Indian post-production business.

But that is how businesses compound.

Not through one giant leap but through a series of seemingly unreasonable decisions that, in hindsight, start looking inevitable.

And that is the real story behind DNEG and Prime Focus - It is the story of an entrepreneur who refused to accept that the place where he started had to determine the level at which he eventually competed.

You may not get to start where you want to be.

But never forget who you truly are and what you are capable of becoming