Love & War Finally Has a Release Date: Everything Confirmed About Bhansali's Ranbir-Alia-Vicky Epic
Sanjay Leela Bhansali doesn't move fast, and Love & War has tested that reputation more than any film he's made in years. Nearly two years after cameras first rolled, the project finally has two things it didn't have a week ago: an official first-look poster of Ranbir Kapoor, released September 24, 2026, and a locked worldwide theatrical release date of January 21, 2027, in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu. Neither of those facts settles the whole story — this is a film that's been reported at three different release windows over the past two years — but they're the first hard confirmations to land after a long stretch of speculation. Here's what's actually confirmed about Bollywood's most-delayed epic, now that it finally has a release date.
The poster: Ranbir Kapoor, a blue convertible, and a bloodied hand
The first-look image, released September 24, 2026, shows Kapoor in vintage styling behind the wheel of a classic blue convertible — T-shirt, sunglasses, a short buzz cut. It's a clean, retro image on its face, the kind of poster that could pass for pure period glamour. Except for one detail that undercuts the glamour on purpose: visible bruising and blood on his left hand, resting on the wheel. That's not incidental styling. It's a deliberate signal, planted right in the first image the public gets of this character, that whatever this man's life looks like, it isn't clean.
The poster carries a tagline — "Woh rutba, woh raub, woh junoon!" ("That status, that fear, that passion!") — which leans into exactly that tension. Status and fear and passion aren't three complementary ideas; they're three things that tend to pull a character in different directions at once, and putting all three on the poster alongside a bruised hand suggests Bhansali is selling Kapoor's character as someone whose position comes at a cost, not someone who simply has it all. It's a first look doing real narrative work rather than just introducing a face.
The release date, and the long road to it
Love & War is now confirmed for a worldwide theatrical release on January 21, 2027, across Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu. That date is worth putting in context, because it's the third publicly discussed release window this film has had.
The project was originally targeted for March 20, 2026. That date came and went without the film. It was then reportedly moved to August 14, 2026 — the Independence Day weekend slot — according to Pinkvilla, which sourced that report to Variety and was explicit that the date was "not officially confirmed" at the time. Worth being precise about that one: the August date was never a confirmed release date that got pushed back. It was a reported target, floated in trade coverage, that never became official before the film moved past it too. Now, with January 21, 2027 locked in and attached to an actual poster campaign, this is the first of the three dates that comes with the weight of an official announcement behind it rather than trade speculation.
Why the August date slipped: 125 days shot, a "big chunk" left
The reporting around the August 14, 2026 target gives a useful window into why Love & War has taken this long to schedule. At the point that date was being reported, the production had completed roughly 125 shooting days — a substantial amount of footage for any film — but a "big chunk" of the shoot still remained, including a major schedule set in Sicily, Italy, that was needed to shoot the film's climax. A production still owing its climax, shot on location overseas, isn't a production that's close to locking a release date, regardless of how many days it's already banked. That gap between days shot and work remaining is the most concrete explanation on record for why the film kept sliding past its earlier targets.
The production timeline: nearly two years of filming
Laid out end to end, the shooting schedule for Love & War is genuinely unusual by Hindi film standards. Principal photography began November 7, 2024. A final major shooting schedule then ran through August 3, 2026, at Royal Palms in Goregaon, Mumbai, before the shoot wrapped in early September 2026. That's nearly two years of principal photography for a single film — a scale of shooting time usually reserved for VFX-heavy two-part epics rather than a romantic drama, even one billed as an epic itself.
Reports describe the production including large dance sequences and major war set-pieces, with hundreds of background and stunt performers involved across those sequences. The film is now in post-production and pick-up shoots, which is the standard phase between a wrap and a release-ready cut, but one that still carries real work — VFX, sound design, scoring, editing — before January.
The reunions this film represents
Part of what's made Love & War a closely watched project since it was first announced is the set of collaborations it represents, none of which are minor. This is Sanjay Leela Bhansali's first film with Ranbir Kapoor in roughly two decades — their only previous collaboration was Saawariya, released in 2007, which was also Kapoor's debut. Two decades is a long gap for a director and an actor to circle back to each other, and it puts real weight on this reunion as a statement about where both of their careers stand now compared to where they started together.
It's also Alia Bhatt's second Bhansali project, following Gangubai Kathiawadi, a film that earned her some of the strongest reviews and awards recognition of her career. That prior collaboration raises the bar for what audiences are likely to expect from her work here rather than lowering it — a director-actor pairing that's already delivered once tends to get judged against its own precedent.
And for Vicky Kaushal, this is his first-ever collaboration with Bhansali, period. Of the three leads, Kaushal is the one stepping into entirely new creative territory with this director, which makes his role in the film arguably the most interesting unknown of the three, at least from a pure career-trajectory standpoint.
Who's playing whom, and the genre question
The plot, as reported, centers on an epic romantic war drama built around a love triangle. Ranbir Kapoor and Vicky Kaushal reportedly play Air Force officers whose lives become entangled with Alia Bhatt's character — a setup that tracks with the bruised-hand detail on Kapoor's poster and with a production that's apparently shot major war set-pieces alongside large dance sequences.
Worth flagging a minor discrepancy in how outlets are describing the film's genre: The Week frames it as a romantic war drama, while Pinkvilla has described it in places as a period drama. Those aren't necessarily contradictory — a story about Air Force officers could easily be both period-set and war-adjacent — but it's a detail that hasn't been fully standardized across coverage, and this piece is going with The Week's more detailed framing since it comes with the added specificity of the Air Force officer setup, while treating "period drama" as a secondary, less detailed description rather than a competing claim.
Supporting cast confirmed for the film includes Supriya Pathak, though a full cast list beyond the three leads and Pathak hasn't been made public as of this writing.
The marketing rollout still to come
With a poster now out and a date now locked, the next confirmed marketing beat is a teaser expected around Diwali, in November 2026. That teaser is reportedly planned to be attached theatrically to Ramayana: Part 1 — meaning audiences seeing Nitesh Tiwari's mythological epic in theatres this Diwali may get their first moving-footage look at Love & War before either film's own release. A full trailer is then expected in December 2026, roughly a month ahead of the January 21 release.
That rollout shape — poster in September, teaser attached to a major Diwali release in November, full trailer in December, release in January — is a fairly conventional four-month countdown for a big Hindi film. What makes it notable here is simply that it's happening at all, after two years in which the film's timeline had mostly been defined by delay rather than forward motion.
What's confirmed, and what still isn't
Worth being direct about where the line sits. Confirmed: the January 21, 2027 worldwide release date across Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu. Confirmed: the September 24, 2026 first-look poster and its details. Confirmed: the production timeline, from the November 7, 2024 start through the early September 2026 wrap. Confirmed: the cast reunions and first-time collaboration described above, and Supriya Pathak's presence in the supporting cast.
Less settled: the exact genre framing, given the romantic-war-drama-versus-period-drama split between The Week and Pinkvilla. Also unconfirmed: any budget figure for the film. Despite nearly two years of shooting, large-scale set-pieces, and an overseas schedule in Sicily, no reliable reporting has put a number on what Love & War has actually cost to make, and any figure circulating without a named source should be treated as speculation rather than fact.
What to watch for between now and January
A few things are worth tracking as the release date approaches. First, whether the Diwali teaser actually materializes attached to Ramayana: Part 1 as reported, or whether that plan shifts the way earlier release-date plans for this film already have twice. Second, whether the finished film leans harder into the "romantic war drama" framing or the "period drama" framing once real footage is out, which should settle that discrepancy on its own. Third, whether a production this long in the making — two years of shooting, a climax shot on location in Sicily, hundreds of performers in its set-pieces — delivers the kind of scale its rollout is promising, or whether the extended timeline reads differently in hindsight depending on how the finished film is received.
None of that is answerable yet. What's answerable right now is that a film which spent the better part of two years without a release date anyone could fully trust finally has one, backed by an official poster and a director-actor reunion two decades in the making.
Love & War opens worldwide on January 21, 2027, in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu — watch for the Diwali-timed teaser reportedly attached to Ramayana: Part 1, a full trailer in December, and whether nearly two years of production translates into the kind of scale the first-look poster is promising.