3 Idiots is a 2009 Indian Hindi-language coming-of-age comedy-drama film co-written (with Abhijat Joshi) and directed by Rajkumar Hirani. The film stars Aamir Khan, R. Madhavan, Sharman Joshi, Kareena Kapoor, Boman Irani and Omi Vaidya. The film follows the friendship of three students at an Indian engineering college and is a satire about the social pressures under an Indian education system.[6][7][8] The film is narrated through parallel dramas, one in the present and the other ten years in the past.

Produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra under the banner Vinod Chopra Films, and based on Chetan Bhagat's novel Five Point Someone: What not to do at IIT! for which author was not suitably credited,[9][10][11] the film incorporated real Indian inventions created by Remya Jose,[12] Mohammad Idris,[13] Jahangir Painter[14] and Sonam Wangchuk.[15] It received widespread critical[16] and commercial success upon its release on 25 December 2009. It was also the highest-grossing film in its opening weekend in India, had the highest opening day collections for an Indian film up until that point and also held the record for the highest net collections in the first week for a Bollywood film. It also became one of the few Indian films at the time to become successful in East Asian markets such as China[17] and Japan,[18] eventually bringing its worldwide gross to ₹3.92 billion ($90 million)[a][4][5] — it was the highest-grossing Indian film ever at the time.[19] The film also had a social impact on attitudes to education in India,[20] as well as education in other Asian countries such as China.[7]