As Avatar is enjoying its one billion-dollar earnings at the box office, over in India, the highest-grossing Bollywood film of all time is called 3 Idiots and it was released late last year on Christmas day, December 25^th. This little 2-D film about three friends from college earned 1.5 billion rupees worldwide (it made $5.6 million in the US box office), and was made for less than the cost of Avatar's catering bill.

All this success isn't without its controversy, as writer Chetan Bhagat of Five Point Someone, in which the film is based on, went on a rant on his blog with his issue with the writing credits (the popular blog entry generated over 2500 comments). The director Rajkumar Hirani addressed some of these issues on the 3 Idiot's Youtube Channel, even showing the legal contract between the two. Both of these two creators made excellent cases, and I can understand the frustration that Bhagat is feeling if he's not given the credit that's due to him. Although to be honest, if the film is 95% different than his book, then he shouldn't complain that he accepted the money they paid him to adapt it for the movies. Bhagat claimed that he never saw the final script, and Hirani said they sent him several revisions.

Anyway, back to youtube, according to Dear Cinema, 3 Idiots will be the first film to be officially released on the video streaming website - although as of this writing, it doesn't look like there are any solid plans to have the nearly THREE hour film on youtube.

The soundtrack to the film is available as a 7-track EP under the composer's Shantanu Moitra credit. My favorite is the love song "Zoobi Doobi", credited to Sonu Nigam and Shreya Ghoshal. If you recall my article on Slumdog Millionaire, I mentioned that I liked his songs. In an interview with the director, he wanted every typical "love song" to be written in "Zoobi Doobi", so as you can see in from the clip of the musical number in the film - that's pretty much what you got!