Netflix has released the official trailer for Best of the Best, a colourful new coming-of-age comedy that takes audiences inside the fiercely competitive world of collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance.
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan stars as Maya alongside Priyanka Kedia as Anjali, two childhood best friends beginning a new chapter of their lives at UCLA.
Their friendship has survived growing up together.
College may prove considerably more complicated.
When Maya convinces Anjali to audition for the university’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team, what begins as an exciting opportunity quickly becomes something far more intense.
The team is not simply dancing for fun.
They want to become the best in the country.
That means relentless rehearsals, increasingly ambitious choreography and a national competition where every rival team is just as determined to win.
The official trailer embraces that intensity while keeping the film’s playful tone firmly intact.
Dance practices become physically exhausting.
Team politics become increasingly dramatic.
Friendships are tested.
And apparently even hair can become collateral damage when artistic ambition gets out of control.
For Maya, the experience offers an opportunity to throw herself into something she genuinely wants.
She is confident, confrontational and willing to push boundaries, but the trailer also reveals a more vulnerable side beneath that energy.
Anjali is facing a different challenge.
She has spent much of her life understanding herself through familiar roles — loyal daughter, dependable friend and the person other people expect her to be.
Joining the dance team forces her to begin discovering who she is when those expectations no longer provide the answer.
That difference between the two friends becomes increasingly important as the pressure of competition grows.
Bollywood fusion demands enormous commitment from everyone involved, but Maya and Anjali are also navigating college, relationships, family expectations and the gradual process of becoming independent adults.
The result is a dance movie where winning the championship may be the immediate goal, but friendship and self-discovery provide the larger stakes.
Hasan Minhaj joins the cast as professor Hamza Latif.
Minhaj also co-wrote the screenplay with longtime collaborator Prashanth Venkataramanujam, drawing inspiration from their own experiences with South Asian American college culture and the competitive Bollywood-fusion scene.
Both writers have described the film as a celebration of friendship, sisterhood and self-acceptance, as well as a love letter to a particularly important part of the South Asian American college experience.
Director Lena Khan brings that world to the screen with a deliberately energetic visual style.
The filmmaker behind Flora & Ulysses has described Best of the Best as several different kinds of movie operating simultaneously: a dance film, a friendship story, a coming-of-age comedy and a large-scale spectacle driven by ambition.
The wider ensemble includes Chaneil Kular, Ankur Rathee, Shreya Navile, Nico Greetham, Lilly Singh, Janina Gavankar, Saara Chaudry and Kavi Ramachandran.
But the relationship between Maya and Anjali remains at the heart of the story.
Their friendship brought them onto the dance floor together.
The question is whether it can survive everything required to reach the top.
Competitive Bollywood fusion may be colourful, energetic and enormously entertaining to watch, but the trailer makes clear that the performers involved take it extremely seriously.
Long rehearsals, creative rivalries and the pressure to produce increasingly spectacular routines transform the competition into something that can feel almost like life or death to the students involved.
That intensity gives Best of the Best its central conflict.
Maya and Anjali want to prove that they can compete with the strongest teams in the country.
But somewhere between chasing trophies and trying to become the people they think they should be, both may have to reconsider what actually makes someone the best.
Best of the Best premieres globally on Netflix on September 18, 2026.
Watch the official trailer below.
