Illuminate Drones Flew the Drone Show in Netflix's Best of the Best

Best of the Best landed on Netflix today, and about three minutes in you'll watch a drone show fall apart at a high school talent contest. Those are our drones, and they're wrecking that routine on purpose. We've been sitting on this one since last summer!

The movie is a Bollywood fusion dance comedy from director Lena Khan, co-written by and starring Hasan Minhaj, with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia as lifelong best friends Maya and Anjali. It opens on the two of them swinging for the fences at their high school talent show. The drones come in with the routine, and then everything goes wrong in front of the entire school. The movie calls it the Drone Strike. It goes viral inside the story, and everything that happens afterward traces back to that one moment.

Making a drone show look broken is harder than making one look perfect

This is the part we had the most fun with. A swarm that's supposed to look out of control is actually hard to do and properly control. Every one of them has to sell the idea that nobody is driving, while flying a path that was planned down to the inch. Like every stunt, it needs to be done perfectly "wrong".

Then you have to do it again. A film crew shoots the same moment from several angles so the editor can cut between them, which means the drone that veers off has to veer off the same way on take nine as it did on take one. A real malfunction could never give them that. Only a precise system can fake one.

So let's be clear about what you're watching: the mishaps are planned or dressed up a bit for the camera. The Drone Strike is a stunt. Every flight path was designed to look like a failure and flown on purpose.

The drones were also inches from the dancers, and at one point in the scene they pass right over the cast's heads. That's not a distance anyone should work at with a system they're guessing about. Illuminate Drones spent two days on set in New Jersey in July 2025, rehearsing the number with the cast before the cameras rolled and then flying it live, indoors, right there with them. What you see in the frame is a real drone show doing precisely what it was told to do.

Why that matters when nobody is filming

Precision is what your event is buying too, just pointed at a better outcome. Most clients want a design that's sharp, a reveal that hits on the beat and a show that flies close to the crowd inside a venue with a ceiling and a lighting rig already in it. That takes the same control it takes to fake a disaster.

Illuminate Drones flies conferences, galas, product launches, corporate celebrations, arena tours and school assemblies, indoors and in front of the crowd. A movie set was just a different audience.

You can watch the full video here.

Book one for your event

Send us your venue and your date, and we'll tell you straight whether it fits before you commit to anything. Most indoor drone shows run between $25,000 and $30,000.

See what an indoor show looks like at indoor drone shows, or read how drone light shows work if you're new to this. Ready now? Get a quote.