Delhi is currently a soup of particulate matter and humidity. It’s the kind of air that makes your lungs feel like they’ve been lined with sandpaper. But that hasn’t stopped the production of Naagzilla from grinding Rajpath to a halt. Kartik Aaryan is currently dangling from a series of carbon-fiber wires near India Gate, looking like a man who is very much aware that his career now depends on his ability to look terrified of a green-screen tennis ball.
The spectacle is a predictable mess. Hundreds of onlookers are shoved behind rusted police barricades, their phones held high, hoping for a blurry shot of the star. Traffic is backed up all the way to Janpath. The cost of this little field trip? Sources say the production is burning through roughly ₹2.5 crore a day just to manage the logistics of shutting down one of the most sensitive security zones in the country. That doesn’t include the insurance premiums for the "intense stunts" Aaryan is reportedly performing.
In reality, these stunts aren't exactly Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane. It’s mostly Aaryan sprinting across a temporary rig, dodging imaginary debris that will be added three months from now by an overworked VFX house in Hyderabad. The tech on display is impressive, if you’re into that sort of thing. They’re using a fleet of heavy-lift drones equipped with Arri Alexa 35s to capture the scale of the monument. It’s high-fidelity cinema meant to be consumed on a six-inch smartphone screen while someone ignores their commute.
The cynicism of the "Monster-Verse" pivot in Indian cinema isn’t a secret. It’s a survival tactic. When the mid-budget drama died, it left a void that only giant reptiles and snake-human hybrids could fill. Naagzilla is the logical conclusion of a decade of algorithmic data points telling producers that people like snakes, people like Godzilla, and people really like Kartik Aaryan’s hair.
But there’s a friction here that the PR team won’t mention. To get these shots, the production had to agree to a bizarre set of constraints from the Archaeological Survey of India. No vibrations above a certain decibel. No permanent fixtures. No high-intensity lights pointed directly at the stone for more than ten minutes. It’s a delicate dance between preserving a national monument and blowing it up digitally for a three-star review.
Aaryan himself looks tired. Between takes, he’s surrounded by a phalanx of assistants holding umbrellas and portable air purifiers. He’s the face of a new kind of stardom—one that requires less acting and more physical endurance against the elements and the sheer absurdity of the material. He’s jumping over crates, sliding across the pavement, and pretending the Delhi heat isn't melting his makeup. It’s a grind. A high-stakes, high-budget grind that feels increasingly disconnected from anything resembling a story.
The tech stack behind this is meant to bridge that gap. They’re using real-time spatial mapping to ensure the CGI snake—presumably the "Naag" part of the title—wraps around India Gate with mathematical precision. It’s expensive. It’s loud. It’s disruptive. And yet, the end result is almost always a blur of pixels that look the same whether they’re shot in Delhi or a parking lot in Burbank.
The local shopkeepers aren't thrilled. The ice cream vendors who usually swarm the area have been pushed back three blocks, losing their prime sunset real estate for the sake of a "Pan-India" blockbuster. One vendor told me he doesn't care about the snake-monster; he just wants the road open so he can sell a Chocobar. It’s a fair point. We sacrifice public spaces for the content industrial complex, and we don’t even get a decent script out of it.
By the time the sun dips behind the canopy, the crew is packing up. The wires are coming down. Aaryan disappears into a tinted SUV, whisked away to a five-star hotel where the air is filtered and the reality of Naagzilla can be ignored for a few hours. The rest of the city is left with the leftover smog and a slightly longer commute home.
The shoot moves to the narrow lanes of Old Delhi tomorrow. More drones. More wires. More "intense" pretending. We’ve reached a point where the production of the spectacle is more interesting than the spectacle itself. We watch the behind-the-scenes clips on Instagram, admire the hustle, and then complain about the ticket prices.
Is a giant snake wrapped around a war memorial worth a four-hour traffic jam? Maybe ask the guy who spent his entire afternoon staring at a green stick.