Every Zendaya Film and Show That Matters — and Where to Watch Them in India

Where it starts: a Disney Channel sitcom about two teenage backup dancers in Chicago, which ran for three seasons from 2010. She was fourteen when it was cast. Nothing in it predicts anything that follows, which is the point — this is the exact career path that almost never leads anywhere.

The second Disney series, in which she plays a teenage spy — and the significant part is that she was a producer on it at eighteen and negotiated changes to the character before agreeing to do it. It is the earliest visible evidence of the thing that has defined the career since: she chooses, rather than being cast.

Anne Wheeler, the trapeze artist, opposite Zac Efron — and the trapeze duet that became the film's most-watched sequence. It is her first adult film role and it made $435 million worldwide off a soundtrack that outlived the reviews by several years.

Cast as the sardonic classmate 'Michelle', in a part that was barely a part until the final scene revealed her initials. It is also where she met Tom Holland, in 2016 — a fact that took five years to be acknowledged and a decade to become a marriage.

Rue Bennett, and the role that made everything else possible. Two Emmys — 2020, when she became the youngest winner of Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, and 2022. Sam Levinson's series returned for a third and final season on 12 April 2026, with HBO confirming the show had concluded when the last episode aired on 31 May. It is the only thing on this list she has done for eight years straight.

Shot in secret during the 2020 lockdown, in black and white, with a cast of two — her and John David Washington, arguing for 106 minutes. She produced it. The reviews were mixed and it does not matter: this is the film where she demonstrated she could carry something with no plot, no spectacle and nowhere to hide.

Chani, in a first film that gives her very little to do beyond appear in visions — a piece of casting that only makes sense once you have seen the second one. Denis Villeneuve's adaptation took $434 million in 2021 and won six Academy Awards.

Her highest-grossing film at $1.92 billion, and the one where MJ stops being a foil. The final scene — in which she is left with no memory of Peter Parker — is the best piece of acting anyone does in the franchise, and it works in large part because by December 2021 the audience knew the two actors were together.

The film that reframed the whole trilogy around Chani, and the reason Dune: Part Three carries the weight it does. Villeneuve's decision to have her reject Paul entirely at the end is a departure from the novel and the single most-argued-about choice in either film. $714 million worldwide.

Tashi Duncan, in Luca Guadagnino's tennis triangle — a producer credit again, and a character written to be unlikeable and played without any attempt to soften it. It is the strongest performance in her filmography and the one that settled the question of whether she could carry an adult drama without a franchise attached.

Kristoffer Borgli's romantic black comedy, released by A24 on 3 April 2026, with her and Robert Pattinson as an engaged couple whose relationship comes apart in the week before the wedding. Produced by Ari Aster's Square Peg. It made $126.1 million on a $28 million budget — an unusually good number for an original adult comedy — and reached HBO Max in the US on 31 July.

Athena, in Christopher Nolan's Homer adaptation — the goddess who appears to Odysseus at the turning points and pushes him home. Her first Nolan film, her first project alongside Tom Holland outside Spider-Man, and the biggest global opening of Nolan's career at $263.8 million. It has since passed $1.12 billion. Still in cinemas.

MJ again, two weeks after The Odyssey, in the film that took the biggest opening weekend in the history of the medium — $360.1 million domestically — and passed $1.7 billion. Having the two biggest films of a year in cinemas simultaneously is not something a working actor gets to arrange; it happened to her and to Tom Holland at the same time.

18 December, and the closest thing she has to a franchise of her own — Chani's unresolved arc from Part Two is the thread the entire conclusion hangs on. Timothée Chalamet returns as Paul and Robert Pattinson joins for the finale. It opens on the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, which nobody has yet blinked on.