By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi, Sept 30, 2025: The arrest of Sonam Wangchuk, Ladakh’s renowned environmentalist, has revived interest in “3 Idiots,” reportedly the 21st century’s most popular Indian film.
The inspiration behind the 2009 Hindi coming-of-age satirical comedy-drama film was Wangchuk, who has led a five-year-long agitation for Ladakh’s statehood and inclusion under the Sixth Schedule.
On September 26, the 59-year-old activist was arrested under the National Security Act while he was on his way to address a press conference. The arrest took place just two days after violent protests erupted in Leh, the headquarters of Ladakh.
The local offices of the Bharatiya Janata Party were among the buildings set on fire. The police responded with live ammunition, killing at least four protesters who were demanding autonomy and statehood for Ladakh. At least 90 were wounded.
Internet services were suspended, curfews were imposed, and dozens of residents, including Wangchuk’s supporters, were rounded up.
Wangchuk has since been lodged in Jodhpur prison in Rajasthan.
A report in The Hindustan Times quoted the Internet Movie Database’s (IMDb) new report put “3 Idiots” on the top of the chart of the biggest trends in Indian cinema over the last 25 years.
The report, which coincided 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.
Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots reigns supreme, scoring 100 on the global popularity index, signifying its near-universal global popularity.
The film 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 percent 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 them has a global popularity rating of even 60, the report says.
“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.”
The “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 US$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 Taiwan, it even beat the collections of James Cameron’s Avatar.
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.