Bollywood never needed an invitation to the world party, it has been dancing into it for decades. But something is different in the last few years. Song and dance numbers, once a niche cultural export, are now a mainstream reference point, college dance teams inspired by Bollywood choreography are filling arenas across the United States, and streaming giants have finally caught on that this energy travels. Netflix, in particular, has spent the last few years quietly building a slate that treats South Asian stories not as a side dish, but as the main course.
Enter “Best of the Best,” Netflix’s latest coming-of-age comedy. It takes the electric, high-stakes world of competitive collegiate Bollywood fusion dance and makes it about friendship, ambition, and figuring out who you are when the spotlight hits. It’s shiny, it’s funny, it’s got rhythm and it’s arriving with a cast and creative team who know this world inside out. But before you rearrange your schedule for its Netflix debut, here’s everything you need to know about the film’s story, its cast, and why its Bollywood heartbeat makes it one of the most unique additions to Netflix’s upcoming lineup.
Netflix’s Best of the Best – Story & Premise
The Best of the Best is, at its heart, a classic coming-of-age story wrapped in sequins and set to a killer beat. The story follows Maya and Anjali, two childhood best friends who arrive at UCLA and decide to join the university’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team. What begins as a fun, bonding extracurricular quickly becomes something much darker: the road to the U.S. championship turns out to be more cutthroat, catty, and emotionally charged than either of them ever thought it would be.
As the girls ascend the dance circuit, the film explores how competition alters people and how it strains even the closest of bonds. Cliques form, rivalries flare, and the desperate urge to win begins to put a strain on Maya and Anjali’s ten-year friendship. The film promises to meld big, spectacle-driven dance numbers with an intimate story of loyalty, identity and growing up without giving away where their journey takes them.
“The appeal of the script was it felt like seven different movies in one,” said director Lena Khan. “It’s a dance movie, a friendship movie and one with real emotional depth, all rolled into one high-energy package.” That layered quality is part of what is creating buzz ahead of release: this is not just a dance movie for the sake of spectacle, it is a story that uses the dance floor as a mirror for all that its characters are going through off of it.
Best of the Best: Best Quotes and Dialogues
Here are where you’ll find the movie’s most memorable lines, the laugh-out-loud one-liners, the gut-punch moments between Maya and Anjali and the dialogues and quotes that captures exactly what it feels like to fight for something you love.
1. We’re at college! Can you believe it?
2. – I did something fun.
– You signed me up for the dance team?
3. If you try out for the team with me, I won’t let you fail.
4. – Ladies, we’re literally two minutes into day one.
– So sorry, sir. Professor. Man?
5. You are stepping into a legacy.
6. Which is why our goal is simple. Be unforgettable!
7. Every Bollywood team has a few staple characters. Over there, you got your breakers and trickers. Then you got your Bollywood baddies.
8. And every Bollywood team has one random white person who just knows more about Indian culture than everyone else.
9. Let’s get to work. Our next competition is in eight weeks.
10. Tonight, only the best move forward.
11. – We are so screwed.
– I couldn’t agree more.
12. – We gotta respond.
– Put bleach in their water bottles.
– What? No. I meant with our routine.
– We’re going rogue, aren’t we?
– That’s right.
– And I can’t talk you out of it?
– Nah.
13. You don’t even try to be a team player, Maya.
14. – We’re in 54th place.
– God, that is bad.
15. You’re my best friend. I can’t do this without you.
The Bollywood Connection And Why It’s Significant
What really distinguishes Best of the Best from the average campus comedy is that it is rooted in a very real, very vibrant subculture: the American collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance circuit. In the last two decades, contests modeled on the real-world Best of the Best, Legends and the Desi Dance Network have proliferated in popularity on U.S. college campuses, providing a major creative outlet and a space for South Asian community-building. For many students engineers and pre-med majors by day these late-night, high-intensity practice sessions are where they can really let loose and embrace their heritage.
Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, the writers, pulled extensively from their own college experiences with this circuit, Minhaj at UC Davis and Venkataramanujam at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to write a story that, in their words, serves as a love letter to a defining chapter in the South Asian diaspora experience. It’s that personal connection that lends the film’s Bollywood angle real weight: this isn’t Bollywood dance used as decoration, it’s Bollywood dance as a lens for identity, belonging and self-expression.
The significance also extends beyond the story itself. Best of the Best is part of Netflix’s long-term investment in South Asian storytelling, after success of shows like Never Have I Ever and other culturally-specific titles that have had huge runs around the world. It’s a sign that Bollywood-inflected storytelling is no longer a niche interest, but a genuine draw for international streaming audiences and Netflix is positioning itself to lead that charge.
Meet the Cast and Key Characters
Best of the Best brings a known name together with a burst of new South Asian talent:
- Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Maya – Ramakrishnan is best known for playing Devi in Never Have I Ever (and more recently seen in Freakier Friday), and leads the film as one half of its central friendship.
- Priyanka Kedia as Anjali – Kedia is an up-and-coming actress known for Everything to Me, and she rounds out the film’s central duo as Maya’s best friend from childhood.
- Hasan Minhaj as Hamza Latif – The Patriot Act comic, who co-wrote and produced the film, plays a professor stuck in the midst of the dance team.
They’re joined by a deep supporting ensemble including Chaneil Kular (“Sex Education”), Ankur Rathee (“Single Papa,” “Shehzada”), Shreya Navile (“Month of Madhu”), Nico Greetham (“The Prom”), Lilly Singh (“Bad Moms”), Janina Gavankar (“The Morning Show”), Sasha Bhasin (“XO, Kitty,” “The Pitt”), Saara Chaudry (“The Breadwinner”), Kavi Ramachandran (“The Sex Lives of College Girls”), as well as Becky Alex, Nihar Duvvuri, Amryn Khurana and Tanishq Joshi.
Best of the Best Budget, Release Date & Production
- Budget: As with most Netflix Original films, the studio has not officially announced a production budget for Best of the Best. Netflix doesn’t often publish these numbers, so until (or unless) that changes, this is one of the few things fans will have to do without.
- Release date: Best of the Best will have its World Premiere on Netflix on September 18, 2026.
- Production Notes: This project has had a longer journey to the screen than its release date would indicate. It was first announced in December 2021 under the working title For the Culture, and was in development at Amazon Studios before finally landing at Netflix. Production was started and filming commenced in July 2025.Lena Khan (Flora & Ulysses, and several episodes of Never Have I Ever) directs; the screenplay is co-written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam. Minhaj and Venkataramanujam are producing through their banner, 186K Films, with Jonathan Eirich for Rideback, and Ryan Halprin and Ellen Schwartz serving as executive producers. The story takes place at UCLA, home to its fictional Bollywood fusion dance team.
Genre, Themes, Important Facts about Best of the Best
Best of the Best is a coming of age comedy with a running time of 1 hour 52 minutes, and a PG-13 rating.
Thematically, the film is about sisterhood, friendship, and self-acceptance Minhaj has said simply that it’s a story about whether a lifelong bond can withstand the pressure of competition. It’s about what it means to be seen, Venkataramanujam defines its emotional core even more simply. Alongside the core friendship, the movie explores the wider immigrant and diaspora experience, revealing the ways in which cultural traditions change and take on new forms when they are transplanted to a college campus thousands of miles from their original homes.
The creative team behind the Best of the Best film has referenced an eclectic mix of influences. As for the film’s warmth and sincerity, Minhaj and Venkataramanujam have referred to the 2018 romantic comedy To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before as a tonal touchstone, while director Lena Khan has cited Dope and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as visual references, hoping to achieve a music-video-inspired esthetic to accompany bold, editorial fashion choices throughout the film.
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Final Words
Bollywood’s rhythm always had a way of pulling people onto the dance floor whether they meant to join in or not and Best of the Best looks primed to do exactly that to Netflix’s global audience. It is a film with real cultural roots, propelled by a cast that clearly knows the world they are inhabiting and a story that takes friendship and identity as delicately as it does its dance numbers. Throw in a creative team drawing from beloved coming-of-age classics and a visually audacious, spectacle-driven directorial vision, and you have a film that feels engineered to be both a crowd-pleaser and a cultural moment.
If everyone’s talking about the movie Best of the Best, and you find yourself queueing up your own Bollywood-fusion playlist the moment the credits roll, then you shouldn’t be surprised to find it’s September 18.
Watch Best of the Best on Netflix
