Lena Khan’s Netflix film Best of the Best brings competitive Bollywood-fusion dance to the streaming platform when it premieres Friday, and the director discussed making the movie with stars Hasan Minhaj and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan in a Variety interview.
Khan said the story follows childhood best friends Maya and Anjali as they join UCLA’s competitive dance team and confront cultural and creative pressures, material the director adapted to a full-length feature for Netflix. The Variety piece notes the film “premier[es] Friday on Netflix,” placing the release as the central launch date for the movie.
The interview also confirms Hasan Minhaj appears in the film in a co-starring capacity, and Khan described working with him during production. Khan told Variety she encouraged lead Maitreyi Ramakrishnan to bring “Channing Tatum energy” to key dance scenes as she shaped the film’s tone and performances.
Best of the Best mixes campus rivalry with South Asian dance traditions, a corner of American college culture that Khan told Variety has been thriving for decades but rarely dramatized in a scripted feature. The director framed the film as both a celebration of those communities and a narrative about friendship under competitive pressure.
The Netflix release positions Best of the Best for a broad audience; Khan and the cast worked to balance authentic Bollywood-fusion choreography with a mainstream comedy-drama structure, according to the Variety interview. The piece quotes Khan on casting and on blending comedy beats with choreography to keep the story emotionally grounded.
For readers tracking new streaming releases, Best of the Best joins a wider slate of Netflix debuts this month. For context on recent platform premieres see a profile of another Netflix arrival in our site coverage and a festival title that earned strong early attention at Telluride.
Production details beyond Khan’s account in Variety — including box-office-style performance metrics or detailed audience reaction after the Netflix launch — were not reported in the interview and are not asserted here.
Sources
- Variety — interview with Lena Khan reporting the film’s Netflix premiere, Khan’s comments about working with Hasan Minhaj, and her direction to Maitreyi Ramakrishnan.
- Power of Pop — internal context link to recent Netflix coverage: Drew Binsky Netflix.
- Power of Pop — internal context link to festival coverage: Telluride debut.
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