Most popular Indian film of 21st century isn't Baahubali, Dangal, RRR, Lagaan, K3G; part of school curriculum abroad

IMDb's new report details the biggest trends in Indian cinema over the last 25 years, also revealing which film made the biggest international impact.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) unveiled its report on 25 years of Indian cinema, chronicling the biggest trends in Indian cinema since 2000. The report, which coincides with 25 years of IMDb's entry in India, looks at the most searched celebs and films from India from 2000-2025, and deduces the top trends in India's entertainment industry during the period. One of the findings of the report has been the rise of crossover films from Indian cinema, ones that find fans overseas and just not from the Indian diaspora. This has led to some films developing sizable popularity globally, and the biggest of them all is an Aamir Khan blockbuster.

IMDb's most popular Indian film of 21st century

A still from Rajkumar Hirani's Aamir Khan-starrer, 3 Idiots.

The report's 'India’s Global Moment' section notes how Indian films are increasingly finding audiences overseas. In this regard, the report plots a graph on Indian films' popularity worldwide, measuring it on two axes: global page views and the percentage of views from non-Indian audiences.

On both parameters, one Bollywood film reigns supreme - Rajkumar Hirani's 3 Idiots. The 2009 film has a perfect 100 score on the global popularity index, signifying its near-universal global popularity. That much is evident by the fact that 3 Idiots is the highest-ranked Indian film in the IMDb Top 250, a list of its top-ranked films. 3 Idiots also scores high among no-Indian audiences, with over 80% of its page views coming from outside India. The only other Indian films with that sort of international appeal are Taare Zameen Par, My Name is Khan, Monsoon Wedding, and The Lunchbox. But none of those films has a global popularity rating of even 60. Other popular films that score high on both indexes include Dangal, RRR, and PK.

Released in 2009, 3 Idiots was among the first modern Indian films to get a sizable non-Indian audience beyond Russia and China. It had an overseas gross of $30.5 million, a record for an Indian film at the time, with record-breaking collections in the US and Australia. But its biggest win was breaking through in newer markets like Taiwan and South Korea. In the former, it even beat the collections of James Cameron's Avatar.

An analysis of Indian films' global popularity from 2000-2025.

In China, the film was a huge hit and cultural phenomenon, with many Chinese universities even prescribing the film in their coursework as a kind of stress-relief in their classrooms.

3 Idiots also starred R Madhavan. Sharman Joshi, Boman Irani, Kareena Kapoor, Omi Vaidya, and Mona Singh. The film was the highest-grossing Indian film at the time, a record that was eventually broken by Dhoom 3 in 2013.