MUMBAI — Netflix’s most-watched non-English film of 2026 is an Indian spy thriller, co-chief executive Ted Sarandos confirmed this week, with Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar drawing 37 million views in the first half of the year and topping the platform’s charts in 22 countries.
The Ranveer Singh film outperformed every English-language title on the service globally over that period. India ranked third for total viewership, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom.
What the number represents
Netflix’s biannual engagement report, released this week, covers January to June 2026. Dhurandhar sits at the top of the non-English film list with 37 million views, and is also the biggest Indian acquired title on the platform for the period.
Sarandos put it plainly while speaking at Express Adda. “Dhurandhar was the most-watched non-English movie in the world this year,” he said, describing it as bigger than every English-language film and second only to the US and UK in terms of viewing.
The film had already shown its reach earlier in the year. In the week of January 26 to February 1, it led Netflix’s non-English film chart with 7.6 million views and 26.1 million hours viewed. It held a place in the Global Top 10 from January 31 through early February, reaching number one in 12 countries. It ranked first in India, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and Bangladesh.
That geography is worth noting. A film about an Indian operative working inside Pakistan topped the charts in Pakistan.
The theatrical run that came first
Dhurandhar released in theatres on December 5, 2025 and earned around ₹3,100 crore worldwide before reaching Netflix. Set in the early 2000s, it follows an undercover Indian operative who infiltrates Karachi’s underworld. Singh plays the lead, with Akshaye Khanna, R. Madhavan, Sanjay Dutt and Arjun Rampal in the ensemble. The runtime is three hours and 26 minutes.
The sequel, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, became the first Bollywood film to cross ₹1,000 crore within India alone. Across both films the franchise has taken more than ₹3,100 crore worldwide. The sequel recorded 27.8 million views on Netflix in the same January-June window and is now streaming on both Netflix and JioHotstar.
The question Sarandos keeps getting
Indian entertainment executives have spent years being asked when India will produce its own Squid Game or Money Heist, a single title that becomes a global cultural event rather than a regional hit that travels.
Sarandos’s answer this week was that the framing itself is off. “India has that moment all the time,” he said, arguing that the country does not need to wait for one breakout title because Indian content is already finding audiences worldwide on a continuing basis.
The data supports a version of that claim, with a caveat. Dhurandhar’s 37 million views is a large number for a non-English film. It is not Squid Game scale, which ran into the hundreds of millions. What it does show is that Indian films now travel reliably rather than occasionally, which is a different and arguably more durable proposition than one breakout title.
Why this film travelled
Dhurandhar’s international pattern is not the usual one for a Hindi film. The standard export market for Bollywood is the diaspora: North America, the Gulf, the UK, Australia. Dhurandhar topped charts in the Gulf, which fits, but it also topped them in Pakistan and Bangladesh, which does not.
Part of the explanation is genre. A spy thriller with a long runtime and a heavy ensemble works in the same register as the international espionage films that stream well everywhere, and it does not require the viewer to know anything about Hindi cinema’s conventions. Part of it is Netflix’s own machinery, which pushes a title into recommendation feeds across dozens of markets once it starts performing in any of them.
The three-and-a-half-hour runtime, which theatrical exhibitors treated as a liability, appears to have mattered less on a platform where viewers watch across sittings.
Ten years in, and what Netflix says it has learned
The Dhurandhar number lands as Netflix completes a decade in India, and the company has been unusually vocal about the market this year.
Monika Shergill, Netflix India’s vice president for content, has described the strategy as deliberately unfocused in the way an Indian meal is. She calls it a “thali” of storytelling, the argument being that a market this size does not reward picking one genre and committing to it.
Sarandos has framed the pricing question as the constraint on growth. “We have expanded our pricing and product options to make Netflix accessible to more people, without moving away from being premium,” he said, describing continuous reinvention of the user experience, plans, payments and distribution partnerships as what has kept the service growing.
He was direct about the competitive pressure that comes with it. “We embrace change and relish and thrive on competition as it pushes us to improve our service even faster for our members,” he said. In India that competition is JioHotstar, and the Ormax numbers below show how comprehensively it is winning on volume.
This month Sarandos spent an evening in Mumbai with writers working on Netflix India’s slate, alongside Shergill, following the launch of the NextGen India Writers’ Program, which brings the company’s global talent development initiative to India for the first time.
That is a signal worth reading against the Dhurandhar result. The film Netflix did best with this year was one it acquired. The investment it is publicising is in developing writers.
Where India actually watches
The Netflix figure sits inside a much larger domestic picture, and the domestic picture is not dominated by film at all.
Ormax Media’s report on Indian OTT viewing from January to June 2026 puts IPL 2026 on JioHotstar at the top with 228.4 million views. That is more than six times Dhurandhar’s global Netflix number, from a single cricket tournament on a single platform.
India’s Got Talent Season 2 on Netflix followed with 38.5 million views. The India versus New Zealand series drew 30.5 million on JioHotstar. Dhurandhar 2 registered 28.8 million across JioHotstar and Netflix in the Indian rankings. Further down the list sit Made in India: The Titan Story on Amazon MX Player at 17.8 million, the FIFA World Cup on ZEE5 at 17.6 million, and The Raja Saab starring Prabhas at 17.5 million.
Live sport, in other words, remains the largest driver of Indian streaming by a wide margin, and cricket remains the largest part of that.
Netflix India’s own slate
Among Netflix India originals, Accused was the most-watched title of 2026 so far. Directed by Anubhuti Kashyap and backed by Karan Johar, the MeToo drama stars Konkona Sen Sharma and Pratibha Ranta.
Made in Korea placed second with 18 million views. Written and directed by Ra Karthik, it follows a young woman from small-town Tamil Nadu navigating Seoul, and stars Priyanka Mohan alongside South Korean actors Park Hye-jin and No Ho-jin. An Emraan Hashmi crime thriller created by Neeraj Pandey, about Indian Customs officers at Mumbai airport, took third.
Netflix said India recorded its biggest-ever first half on the platform in terms of viewing.
What it means for India
The commercial signal is that acquired Indian films can now outperform a streamer’s own originals by a wide margin. Dhurandhar’s 37 million came from a title Netflix bought after a theatrical run, not one it developed. Accused, its best-performing Indian original, did not come close.
That has consequences for what gets funded. If the reliable global performer is a big theatrical Hindi film picked up post-release, streamers have less reason to commission expensive originals and more reason to bid for finished films. Indian producers gain leverage. Indian original programming, which is where riskier and more distinctive work usually lives, gets less of the budget.
The franchise is not finished. Dhurandhar 2 remains in a copyright dispute over the Tirchi Topiwale case, with the Delhi High Court granting OTT release relief on condition that T-Series deposit ₹50 lakh.
