This actor's film tops IMDb's most popular Indian film

An Aamir Khan blockbuster has topped the IMDb report on 25 years of Indian cinema, chronicling the biggest trends in Indian cinema since 2000.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) report coincides with its 25 years in India, and examines the most searched celebrities and films from India from 2000 to 2025.

Here's what the report found:

The IMDb report 'India’s Global Moment' section found that there has been an increase in crossover films from Indian cinema, ones that find fans overseas, not just within the Indian diaspora.

And then came the big revelation — Some Indian films have developed sizable popularity globally, and the biggest of them all is Aamir Khan's 3 Idiots.

The IMDb report shared that Indian films are increasingly finding audiences overseas and plotted a graph on their popularity worldwide, measuring it on two axes:

• Global page views
• Percentage of views from non-Indian audiences

A perfect 100

On both parameters of IMDb, one Bollywood film reigns supreme - Rajkumar Hirani's 3 Idiots starring Aamir Khan.

The 2009 film received a perfect 100 score on the global popularity index, indicating its near-universal global appeal. It is also the highest-ranked Indian film in the IMDb Top 250, a list of its top-ranked films.

The fan-favourite movie also scores high among no-Indian audiences, with over 80% of its page views coming from outside India.

Other Indian films in the IMDb Top 250

The only other Indian films with 3 Idiots sort of international appeal are:

• Taare Zameen Par
• My Name is Khan
• Monsoon Wedding
• The Lunchbox

But none of these films has a global popularity rating of even 60.

Other popular films that score high on both indexes include Dangal, RRR, and PK.

“Few movies truly deserve the title of crossover hits, and this quadrant is dominated by Aamir Khan movies,” IMDb notes, “His dominance proves the might of culturally Indian yet emotionally universal storytelling in the global arena.”