The Vvaan – Force of the Forest: Everything to Know Before Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia's Mythological Fantasy
The Vvaan – Force of the Forest is trying to do two things at once: launch a brand-new mythological universe for Bollywood, and pair Sidharth Malhotra with Tamannaah Bhatia on screen for the first time. It releases in theatres September 25, 2026, after already surviving one release-date scramble before a single review has been written. The hook that separates it from the genre's usual template — gods, forests, trishuls — is that it's reportedly built on a real, centuries-old local legend rather than pure invention. Here's everything confirmed about the film heading into that date.
What the film is actually about
The plot follows Malhotra as a "very contemporary" urban man who returns to his ancestral village and inadvertently awakens a divine forest goddess dwelling in a forbidden forest — one local tradition holds is under active divine protection. What starts as an accidental disturbance escalates into confrontation: a dark supernatural force emerges to challenge that protection, and Malhotra's character is pulled into defending it, trishul in hand, moving through ritual settings and village lore he didn't grow up taking seriously.
Director Deepak Mishra has framed the film's core idea in those exact terms: "This story is about a very contemporary boy who goes back to his roots and follows a path of rediscovery." That's a fairly familiar shape for Hindi mythological fantasy — skeptical modern man forced to reckon with something older and larger than himself — but the specific texture the marketing is leaning on is the setting itself, since the production reportedly shot extensively on real forest locations across Central India rather than relying entirely on built or digital environments.
The real legend behind the fiction
This is the most distinctive thing about The Vvaan, and it's worth spending real time on rather than treating as a footnote. The film draws on the actual folklore surrounding the Van Devi Temple near Patna, a shrine reportedly built in the 16th century. Local tradition around the temple held that the surrounding forest was dangerous enough that people avoided entering it after sunset — a rule passed down as accepted fact in the area rather than formal religious doctrine.
Writer Arunabh Kumar has spoken about the temple's actual history as the seed for the script: "The story behind that temple is that it was built in the 16th century. In the forest, there were some things that used to trouble the people around there." It's worth being precise about what's being claimed here — the film is described as "inspired by" the Van Devi Temple's legend, not a direct dramatization of it. The Vvaan is taking a real, specific piece of regional folk memory — a forest people genuinely avoided after dark, tied to a genuinely centuries-old temple — and building an original supernatural plot around that premise, rather than reconstructing the temple's actual history on screen.
That distinction matters for how to read the rest of the marketing. The forbidden-forest concept, the divine protector goddess, the sense of a place where "some things used to trouble people" — all of that traces back to something that predates the film by roughly 400 years. Whatever else The Vvaan turns out to be as a piece of studio filmmaking, it's not inventing its central image out of nothing. That's a genuinely rare thing for a big-budget Bollywood fantasy to be able to say, and it's the strongest reason to take the project more seriously than the trishul-and-forest-goddess pitch alone might suggest.
The cast, and a first-time pairing
Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia headline the film, and this marks their first on-screen pairing — a notable data point given both actors have been working steadily across Hindi and, in Bhatia's case, multiple South Indian industries for over a decade without previously sharing a screen.
The supporting cast includes Sunil Grover, Maniesh Paul, Shweta Tiwari, and Anup Soni. Grover's casting is worth flagging specifically: he's playing a menacing antagonist named Deepak, a real departure for an actor who built his career on comedy, most visibly through television. Paul rounds out the antagonist's circle as a character named VP.
Who's behind the camera
The Vvaan is directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra, with story and writing credited to Arunabh Kumar and dialogue by Anandeshwar Dwivedi. Manu Anand serves as DOP and visual director, Nitin Baid edits, and casting is by Mukesh Chhabra's CSA. The score is a multi-composer effort split between Vishal Mishra, Amit Trivedi, Tanishk Bagchi, and Sam C.S. — an unusually large composing team for a single film, which typically signals a studio spreading a soundtrack across multiple distinct musical registers rather than betting on one composer's sound for the whole album. Parvez Shaikh is credited as action director, and VFX work is split across Labyrinth Studios, Divinity Pictures VFX, and New Kore VFX, reflecting the scale of the visual effects the forest-goddess and supernatural-force premise presumably demands.
On the production side, the film is backed by Shobha Kapoor, Ektaa R Kapoor, Arunabh Kumar, and Niraj Kothari, and presented by Balaji Motion Pictures/Balaji Telefilms in association with TVF (The Viral Fever) and 11:11 Productions. That's a notable combination of backers — Balaji Telefilms has a long history in Hindi television and film, while TVF's involvement brings in a production house whose reputation was built almost entirely on smaller-scale, internet-first storytelling. A mythological forest epic isn't the kind of project either brand is best known for individually, which makes the pairing itself part of the story.
The release-date shuffle
The Vvaan wasn't originally supposed to open on September 25. The film was first slated for August 28, 2026 — a date that, as it happens, put it on a direct collision course with two other high-profile releases. Yash's pan-India gangster epic Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-ups was set to open August 26, just two days earlier, and Shraddha Kapoor's Eetha was targeting the same August 28 slot outright.
Facing a pan-India event film two days ahead of it and a same-day head-to-head against another mainstream Hindi release, The Vvaan moved to September 25 instead — clearing both potential collisions. It's worth noting that Eetha itself has since shifted further, off that original date entirely and onto December 4, so the specific traffic jam that pushed The Vvaan off its original slot has since dissolved on its own. But the decision to move in the first place reads as a sensible one regardless: going up against a heavily marketed five-language pan-India release, in a genre with real box-office competition of its own, was never a fight worth picking if a clean alternate date was available.
A graphic novel, and franchise speculation
Ahead of the film's release, a tie-in graphic novel titled The Legend of Vvaan has already been published, expanding the mythology the film is built around before a single frame has screened publicly. Trade outlet Koimoi has speculated that this is groundwork for a larger mythological franchise or saga built around the Vvaan concept — but it's important to be precise that this reading is the outlet's own speculation, not something the studio or filmmakers have confirmed directly. Building out expanded lore via a companion graphic novel before a film even opens is a strategy that only makes obvious sense if there's a longer-term plan behind it, so the speculation isn't unreasonable on its face — but "isn't unreasonable" and "confirmed" are different things, and nothing here should be read as an announced sequel or franchise slate.
The teaser, and what's still coming
The official teaser, running 1 minute 56 seconds, dropped Wednesday, August 26, 2026. Malhotra's own caption accompanying the drop, translated, read: "They are our protectors, those who ride tigers! The story of Vvaan arrives on September 25th!" — a line that leans directly into the film's central mythology, framing the forest's protective spirits as tiger-riding guardians rather than purely abstract divine forces.
Malhotra has also confirmed that a second teaser is coming, though it hadn't been released as of this writing. For a film this reliant on a specific, somewhat unusual pitch — real folklore roots, a first-time star pairing, a comic actor playing against type — a second teaser matters more than it might for a more conventional release. The first teaser's job was to introduce the concept and the tiger-riding-protector imagery; whatever the second one leads with will likely say a lot about which part of the pitch the studio thinks is actually going to sell tickets.
What to watch for before September 25
A few things are worth tracking as the release date approaches. First, whether the second teaser leans further into the Van Devi Temple folklore angle or pulls back toward more generic god-versus-demon fantasy imagery — that choice will say a lot about how much the studio trusts the real-world hook to carry the marketing. Second, how Sunil Grover's turn as a menacing antagonist actually reads once trailers show more of him in the role, given how firmly he's associated with comedy in most audiences' minds. Third, whether the Malhotra-Bhatia pairing generates its own conversation independent of the mythological premise, the way first-time on-screen pairings between established stars sometimes do.
And underneath all of it sits the bigger structural question: whether The Vvaan is a self-contained fantasy film that happens to be inspired by real folklore, or the first installment of something Balaji, TVF, and 11:11 Productions are quietly building out for the long haul. The graphic novel suggests the latter is at least on the table. Whether the film itself earns that kind of expansion is a question only September 25 and the weeks after it will actually answer.
The Vvaan – Force of the Forest releases in theatres September 25, 2026 — watch for the confirmed second teaser, and for whether the tie-in graphic novel turns out to be the opening move of a larger mythological franchise or just marketing padding.