SS Rajamouli’s RRR has been making history since it’s theatrical release. Besides raking in thousands of crores at the box-office, the film has been making streaming records too. Months later, the film dropped on Zee5 and Netflix India and records are still being broken by the biggie on streaming platforms. The film has already garnered around 40 million hours (12.7 viewers) in just 17 days and officially made it’s place in the Global Top 10 charts of Netflix. This is not just it, RRR becomes the first and only Indian production to trend on Letterboxd.
For the unfamiliar, Letterboxd is an online social networking service focused on sharing opinions about films, creating watchlists, and logging movies.The site is meant for sharing its members’ tastes in films. Although Letterboxd is a platform whose sample size is low in comparison to IMDB, it consists of extremely picky movie-watchers around the globe. For an Indian film to trend in there, is nothing short of an appreciable feat.
Indian films have never found its place in the ‘Popular this Week’ section of the app since its’ inception. The White Tiger, directed by Ramin Bahrani starring Adarsh Gourav, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Rajkummar Rao was the closest Indian films reached in the platform’s trending list. But, The White Tiger is not an Indian production and it was helmed by a director of Iranian descent.
So this achievement of RRR is impeccable to say the least. Besides finding it’s place on Letterboxd Popular section, the film has been trending on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic as well. RRR also landed a position in Metacritic’s ‘Best Movies of All Time’ list (#411). Well, this is nothing short of what Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) was to Chinese Cinema. We can only hope the world opens its eyes to the glory that Indian Cinema is and always was, with RRR being the frontrunner.