The film was produced while Navalny was beginning to recover from the assassination attempt, and takes its starting point in Dresden, where Putin was a rather insignificant KGB cog in the Soviet control apparatus.
But the focus of the film is the story of the huge palace in southern Russia that Putin had built for himself on a hill overlooking the Black Sea.
In the introduction to the film, Navalny says that he decided that the film would be shown only when he landed in Russia, so Putin could not claim that Navalny was cowardly and only dared to publish the film while he was safe abroad.
Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov has dismissed the film and the information presented there as fantasies.
This is what the Kremlin always does when inconvenient information is leaked.
No flight over the luxury palace
The information is not really that new.
The palace began to be built over ten years ago, turned out to be a fake building, so it had to be rebuilt.
Despite the crisis in Russia's economy, money was not a problem.
Stolen money and the biggest bribes in world history, Navalny claims.
The palace itself is almost 18,000 square meters in size.
The "garden" is 68 hectares.
The entire property, which is not formally owned by Putin himself, is 7,000 hectares in size.
The property is banned from flying and no boats are allowed near the coast outside the palace.
A political scientist critical of the regime tells me that all the information in Navalny's film has been known for a long time.
It is the breakthrough that is the new thing.
The fact that critics of the regime have for years written about and documented the boundless corruption of the Putin regime has not caused many to react.
But now that Navalny's film has been seen (or at least clicked on) by over 40 million people, it means that a large part of Russia's population is beginning to see Putin as a leader who thinks more of himself than of the citizens of his country.
Navalny not credible
Still, Putin and his cronies are sitting in their saddles.
The power apparatus in the Kremlin, led by Putin and his so-called oligarchs, has almost total control over the country.
There are no real political parties, no functioning judiciary, and no significant independent media.
Russia has never been a democracy.
For centuries, Russia's rulers have seen the country as their personal property, and its inhabitants not as citizens but as subjects.
Navalny is unlikely to be able to change that and is hardly credible as a democratic champion.
But all the revelations about the Putin regime's inadequacy and deep immorality are perhaps still something that in the long run can provide future prospects for Russia's hard-pressed population.