Why It's So Hard to Make a Great Movie About Tennis

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Boxing's close-quarter combat has yielded classics like Raging Bull, Rocky, and Creed. Baseball lovers have home runs including Bull Durham, A League of Their Own, and The Natural. Ballers have found inspiration in Hoosiers, He Got Game, and White Men Can't Jump.

Yet somehow, tennis—whose back-and-forth, tit-for-tat gameplay has often been used as a metaphor for the give-and-take nature of acting—has inspired few, if any, great movies.

Why? "More often than not, tennis hasn't looked good" onscreen, says Brad Gilbert, Olympic bronze medallist who now works as both an ESPN commentator and the current coach of reigning US Open champion, Coco Gauff. "It's kind of been an afterthought. Tennis is a little harder to choreograph and script than some other sports."

Gilbert had his work cut out for him as the consultant on Luca Guadagnino's Challengers, which stars Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor in a steamy love triangle that comes to a head in the final of an ATP Challenger event—akin to the minor leagues of tennis. But under his tutelage, the movie bucks the trend for tennis films, joining King Richard and Battle of the Sexes as some of the only ones to capture the sport convincingly and authentically.

As Gilbert explains, most sports can be convincingly fudged for the big screen. There are only so many ways, for instance, that one can swim freestyle, throw a punch, kick a soccer ball, or shoot a basket. But tennis requires hand-eye coordination and a comfort with swift, lateral movement that can take years, if not decades, to fully master.

"In a real, live match, you don't know what's going to happen. Nothing is scripted. This is a little bit different…. You know exactly how the point is going to start and how it's going to finish," Gilbert explains. While it may be possible to digitally stitch an actor's face onto a body double, nobody can fake a full swing itself. "You have to practice the sequence being exactly the same so you could replicate it—so you could do 25 takes of it."

That, in short, is why tennis is so hard to capture on film. If a tennis movie doesn't plan out the rallies well in advance, it's nearly impossible for an actor to replicate the movements of a professional player. But if the actors anticipate each shot too quickly, the audience can usually tell that they knew where the ball was going. Actors must strike a delicate balance between automating their movements and believably reacting to their opponents.

"If you think about it too much, it doesn't look authentic," says Saniyya Sidney, who plays a young Venus Williams in King Richard. Like the stars of Challengers, she practiced a lot without a ball—but there were times when she would have to make contact with her swings.

After learning the fundamentals of the sport during six months of training, it was easier for Sidney to respond "as Venus," she says. "It felt like I was more in the headspace of an athlete versus being an actor trying to learn the sport."

The individual nature of tennis is dramatically exciting: "You're watching a person out there on an island of their own doubts, trying to convince themselves to stay in it," says FBI and Six Feet Under actor Jeremy Sisto, who cowrote and starred in the 2014 tennis comedy film Break Point.

But that very quality also makes visual storytelling tricky. In singles, "it's just those two players that you're covering" with the camera, says Valerie Faris, who directed Battle of the Sexes with her husband, Jonathan Dayton. It can be difficult to find a variety of ways to capture the same set of serves, groundstrokes, and volleys. "Basketball is easier in some ways because there's so much activity. But [in tennis,] you're forced to do a lot of cutting into these tight shots of swings."