Best of the Best Brings Bollywood Dance to Netflix
Best of the Best has arrived on Netflix with a story that combines competitive dance, college comedy, friendship and South Asian-American culture.
Directed by Lena Khan, the new Netflix movie follows childhood best friends Maya and Anjali as they begin college at UCLA and enter the intense world of competitive Bollywood-fusion dance. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia play the two central characters, while comedian Hasan Minhaj appears in the cast and also co-wrote the screenplay with Prashanth Venkataramanujam.
The film premiered on Netflix on Sept. 18, 2026, giving audiences a new take on the familiar college dance movie formula. Rather than simply using dance as a backdrop, Best of the Best places Bollywood-fusion competition at the center of its story and uses it to explore friendship, ambition, identity and growing up.
Variety’s interview with Khan highlights the unusual combination of genres behind the film. The director described the screenplay as containing several different kinds of movies at once, including a dance story, a friendship story and a large-scale spectacle.
Best of the Best Has a Strong South Asian-American Identity
One of the defining features of Best of the Best is its focus on collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance in the United States.
For many South Asian-American college students, competitive dance teams have become important spaces for creativity, community and cultural expression. Netflix’s Tudum notes that the film’s writers drew from their own college experiences with Bollywood dance competitions.
Minhaj attended the University of California, Davis, while Venkataramanujam attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Their experiences helped shape the fictional world of Maya and Anjali.
The concept also reflects the unusual balance many students experience. During the day, members of these teams may focus on demanding academic programs. At night, they can spend hours rehearsing elaborate dance routines.
That contrast became an important part of the film’s appeal. The story presents dance not simply as entertainment but as a major part of the characters’ social lives and personal identities.
For audiences unfamiliar with collegiate Bollywood-fusion competitions, the movie provides an introduction to a culture that has developed across American university campuses.
For viewers who already know the scene, the film offers a fictionalized version of a world that has personal meaning for many South Asian students.
Lena Khan Wanted More Than a Traditional Dance Movie
Director Lena Khan approached Best of the Best with the goal of making the film visually energetic while keeping its emotional core intact.
Khan, whose previous work includes Disney’s Flora & Ulysses, told Variety that she was attracted to the screenplay because it combined several different stories and tones.
Netflix’s Tudum also reported that Khan looked to movies including Dope and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse when developing her visual approach.
That influence can be seen in the film’s emphasis on style, movement and visual energy. Khan wanted the movie to have a music-video quality while also giving its fashion and production design a more editorial feel.
The result is intended to sit somewhere between a conventional college comedy and a large-scale dance spectacle.
That combination is important because the story is not solely about winning a championship. The competitive environment also puts pressure on Maya and Anjali’s friendship, forcing them to confront how much they have changed as they move from childhood into adulthood.
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan Leads the Cast
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan stars as Maya, one half of the film’s central friendship.
Ramakrishnan is widely known for her role as Devi Vishwakumar in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever. Her casting gives Best of the Best a recognizable young lead while also connecting the movie to Netflix’s established audience for coming-of-age stories.
Priyanka Kedia plays Anjali, Maya’s longtime best friend. The two characters enter UCLA together, but their relationship becomes increasingly complicated once competitive dance enters the picture.
The movie therefore gives both performers an opportunity to build a friendship that existed before the story begins. Instead of introducing two strangers who quickly become friends, the film starts with a relationship that already has years of history behind it.
That distinction matters as the competition becomes more intense.
Other cast members include Ankur Rathee, Chaneil Kular, Shreya Navile, Janina Gavankar, Lilly Singh, Saara Chaudry and Hasan Minhaj.
Hasan Minhaj Helped Create the Story
Hasan Minhaj is not simply an actor in Best of the Best.
He co-wrote the screenplay with Prashanth Venkataramanujam and also serves as one of the film’s producers. Minhaj plays Professor Hamza Latif, adding another connection between the story’s comedy and its college setting.
The project has been several years in development.
According to People, Minhaj began working on the project around six years ago, following the birth of his son in 2020. The publication described the movie as a personal project for Minhaj and Venkataramanujam, who wanted to create a joyful story inspired by South Asian-American college experiences.
The filmmakers’ previous collaboration also played a role. The pair worked together on Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, and their experience on that series helped establish their creative partnership.
With Best of the Best, however, they moved into a very different genre.
Instead of focusing on current affairs and political comedy, they built a fictional coming-of-age story around friendship, dance and cultural identity.
The Dance Training Was a Major Part of Production
A dance movie depends heavily on the credibility of its performers.
For Best of the Best, the actors underwent significant preparation to portray competitive dancers convincingly. Cosmopolitan reported that Ramakrishnan and Kedia completed an intensive four-month dance boot camp for the production.
The choreography was handled by Phillip Chbeeb, Makenzie Dustman and Joya Kazi, according to the same report.
That preparation was particularly important because the movie is built around competitive performances rather than occasional dance scenes.
The routines needed to feel physically demanding while also serving the story.
In other words, the dance sequences had to communicate character and conflict, not simply provide spectacle.
That approach is consistent with Khan’s description of the film as a combination of different movie styles. The choreography becomes part of the emotional storytelling rather than functioning as a separate attraction.
Best of the Best Puts Friendship at the Center
Although the film revolves around a national dance competition, the central conflict is personal.
Maya and Anjali begin the story as childhood best friends. College gives them new opportunities, but it also introduces new social pressures and competing ambitions.
Their dance team becomes a place where those differences become impossible to ignore.
Netflix describes the film as a story about sisterhood, friendship and self-acceptance.
That theme has also been highlighted by critics. The New York Times described the competitive dance environment as a way for the two friends to confront who they were before college and who they are becoming.
The Guardian similarly noted that the film uses familiar college-comedy conventions while bringing them together with Bollywood dance and South Asian cultural references.
The friendship storyline therefore gives the movie stakes beyond the final competition.
Winning matters, but understanding one another may matter more.
A Familiar Formula With a Different Cultural Setting
Dance movies are not new.
Hollywood has repeatedly used competitions as a framework for stories about friendship, romance and personal growth. Films such as Bring It On and Bend It Like Beckham demonstrated how competitive activities can become vehicles for broader coming-of-age stories.
Best of the Best enters that tradition but shifts the cultural setting toward American collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance.
That change allows the filmmakers to explore familiar themes through a different community.
The result is not intended to be a documentary about competitive dance. Instead, it uses the culture as the foundation for a fictional comedy-drama.
That distinction is important because the movie embraces heightened situations, elaborate choreography and comedic exaggeration.
At the same time, its creators have emphasized that the world is rooted in real experiences.
Why Bollywood-Fusion Dance Matters to the Story
Bollywood dance is often associated with Indian cinema, but competitive Bollywood-fusion teams in the United States have developed their own identity.
These teams frequently combine Bollywood-inspired choreography with other dance styles and contemporary performance techniques.
For the filmmakers behind Best of the Best, that world represented an opportunity to tell a story about a specific part of the South Asian-American college experience.
Venkataramanujam explained to Netflix that the competitive dance circuit is a major creative outlet for many South Asian students in America.
That background gives the movie a cultural foundation while allowing it to remain accessible to viewers who may have never participated in a collegiate dance competition.
The film can therefore work on two levels: as a familiar underdog-style competition comedy and as a representation of a particular cultural experience.
Best of the Best Is Now Streaming on Netflix
Best of the Best officially premiered on Netflix on Sept. 18, 2026.
The film has a reported runtime of 1 hour and 52 minutes and carries a PG-13 rating.
Its principal cast includes Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Priyanka Kedia, Hasan Minhaj, Ankur Rathee, Janina Gavankar and Chaneil Kular.
Netflix’s official synopsis centers on Maya and Anjali joining UCLA’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team as they attempt to navigate the difficult path toward a U.S. championship.
The movie arrives at a time when streaming services continue to expand the range of stories built around young adult audiences.
But its distinction comes from the combination of an established coming-of-age framework with a relatively underrepresented competitive dance culture.
What Makes Best of the Best Different
The most notable aspect of Best of the Best is not simply that it contains Bollywood dance.
Its larger significance comes from putting a South Asian-American college experience at the center of a mainstream Netflix comedy.
The film combines several recognizable elements: best friends entering college, competitive teams, complicated ambitions, romance, social pressure and an emotionally important final performance.
But the cultural context changes how those elements operate.
The dance team is not merely a fictional club invented for the plot. It is connected to experiences shared by the film’s writers and by a wider community of students who have participated in collegiate Bollywood-fusion competitions.
That foundation gives the movie a stronger sense of place.
It also helps explain why Khan was interested in the project.
Her direction brings together spectacle and character-driven storytelling, while the cast’s dance preparation adds physical credibility to the competition sequences.
Final Thoughts on Best of the Best
Best of the Best arrives on Netflix as a colorful new entry in the college dance movie genre.
Directed by Lena Khan and led by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia, the film uses competitive Bollywood-fusion dance as the setting for a broader story about friendship, identity and the transition into adulthood.
Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam drew from their own experiences to create a story rooted in South Asian-American college culture, while Khan brought a visual approach influenced by contemporary comedy, music videos and stylized filmmaking.
The movie also benefits from extensive dance preparation, with its leading performers completing months of training before filming.
For Netflix viewers, that combination makes Best of the Best more than another competition movie. It is an attempt to bring a specific cultural world to a broad streaming audience while keeping the emotional foundation simple: two longtime friends discovering that growing up can change even the strongest relationships.
With its mixture of comedy, choreography and coming-of-age drama, Best of the Best gives Netflix audiences a fresh Bollywood-fusion perspective on a familiar Hollywood formula.
