20 movies and TV shows that notably featured tennis

We’ll start with a full-on movie about tennis and tennis players. Even those who don’t follow tennis may know of the fabled, made-for-TV event that was the “Battle of the Sexes” between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. Steve Carell and Emma Stone star as Riggs and Stone, respectively, and while the movie is a little staid, to its credit, it isn’t facile, as the logistical realities of the “Battle of the Sexes” weren’t pure “girl power” by any means.

Welp! “King Richard” is about Richard Williams, as well as his daughters Venus and Serena, and how he, in a complicated fashion, helped craft a future for his daughters as tennis stars. Will Smith stars as Williams, and murmurs that he might finally win an Oscar became shouts, with it being a bad year for film and a bad year for Best Actor nominees. You likely know the rest. Smith, in deranged fashion, stormed the stage and slapped Chris Rock. Oh, and then he won the award, which led to a weird acceptance speech, to be sure.

This is the tennis movie for the real heads. The rivalry between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe defined men’s tennis for a few years. Focused on Wimbledon 1980, this is simply a proper sports biopic. It’s probably best enjoyed by tennis fans, but it’s well-done enough that maybe others can still get some enjoyment out of it.

“Challengers” is the antithesis of “Borg vs. McEnroe” because it’s not so much about tennis as it is about horniness. It’s certainly not wholly interested in what makes tennis players tick. “Challengers” focuses on three different levels of tennis players, one portrayed by Zendaya, and the…complications that arise in their personal lives.

Rich people. Affairs. Intrigue. Some tennis. It’s all there in “Match Point.” This thriller focuses on a former tennis star turned tennis instructor at a posh club, who ends up married into a rich family. Unfortunately, he and his brother-in-law’s actress girlfriend have a tryst that threatens to blow everything up. “Match Point” is a good, tense thriller, and it got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Weirdly, we can’t seem to find the name of the screenwriter or the director.

Sports-based romcoms are a subgenre unto themselves, and “Wimbledon” was a fine addition to that category. It’s got a tinge of “A Star is Born” in it, in that Paul Bettany is a tennis star who was pretty successful but is on the fall, while Kirsten Dunst is a tennis player on the rise. The plot is a little rote, but the cast is quite good. I mean, it’s a romcom co-starring Sam Neill!

For whatever reason, Andy Samberg got into a mockumentary run for a minute there. That included HBO’s original film “7 Days in Hell.” It takes the idea of the memorable Isner-Mahut marathon match and takes it to farcical extremes. Samberg and Kit Harington star as the two tennis players locked/trapped in the match that will not end.

The best thing about this movie is the clunkiness of the title “Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach.” Apparently, it was a well-received script floating around Hollywood called just “Gary the Tennis Coach,” but in post-production they decided to slap “Balls Out” on it for a dumb joke. This film comes from the nadir of comedy movies, a time when every movie had an “unrated” edition, including this movie, which was direct-to-video. Anyway, Seann William Scott plays a high school tennis coach. Randy Quaid is in it. It’s bad.

This movie is less focused on tennis than others on this list, as it is an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. However, one of the two main characters is a professional tennis player, and we see him play tennis. The story of “Strangers on a Train” is arguably iconic, and it has been reimagined, reused, and spoofed time and time again. Two unhappy men meet on a train and begin talking idly about how if one person in their life were to die, it would solve a lot of problems. The problem for the tennis player is that the other man takes this idle chatter fully literally, and he expects the same from his counterpart.

Bert Convy became famous as a game show host, but he was also an actor. His acting career didn’t take off quite as he had hoped, but he did star in “Racquet,” a ‘70s sex comedy centering on Convy as a tennis star. Fittingly, both Bjorn Borg and Bobby Riggs are in this movie as well.

In addition to being a good actor, Ida Lupino was one of the most important directors in Hollywood history, a woman not relegated to directing “women’s pictures.” This is not one of Lupino’s noir films, as it is more of a standard drama. “Hard, Fast, and Beautiful” is a title that pops, though, even if the story of a female tennis prodigy doesn’t really knock it out of the park (to mix sports).

Richie Tenenbaum. He took off his shoes…and one of his socks. In Wes Anderson’s dramedy about a dysfunctional family, the once-promising Tenenbaum children are dealing with wayward adulthood. Richie was a tennis pro, but as we see, one day he had a breakdown on the court, and that was the end of the line for “The Baumer.”

There is essentially only one tennis scene in “Blow-Up,” but it is also considered one of the best tennis scenes in film history and one of the indelible scenes of film history. It’s also the ending of the movie, so, um, spoilers? So, if you aren’t familiar (and if you haven’t seen Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out”), it’s about a photographer who believes he accidentally took a photo of a murder being committed. He is driven mad in the pursuit of the truth, whatever it may be. One morning, when he returns to the park, he finds the body gone, and he then sees a mime troupe doing performance art of a mimed tennis match. He watches. A “ball” gets away from the mimes, who implore him to help. He throws the “ball” back. We hear the sounds of tennis. Does he hear the sounds of tennis? What is reality? It’s the most existential mimed game of tennis in cinematic history.

Into the world of television! In the early days of Amazon Prime doing original shows, “Red Oaks” was one of the offerings in the mix. It’s both a period piece and a throwback to coming-of-age stories in the 1980s. They literally did a body-swap episode. The story focuses on a college student working at a country club in the summer, and he gets a job as one of the tennis instructors at the club.

“I Spy” was well-received as a spy drama because it was a “realistic” portrayal of being an intelligence agent. Plus, the main duo at the center of the show was quite popular, and one of them won three Emmys. The unfortunate thing is that the Emmy winner who starred alongside Robert Culp- and we already did a bit with “Match Point,” so we might as well rip the bandage off this time- was Bill Cosby. Anyway, the cover for the two agents is that they are “tennis bums” who travel the world hustling wealthy tennis aficionados.

“Seinfeld” wasn’t about tennis, but it had multiple memorable tennis moments. Most famously, there’s Milos, the tennis shop proprietor who turns out to be terrible at tennis. There’s the time Elaine lent Mr. Pitt’s racket to a woman but can’t get it back because she’s distraught over her arm injury. Kramer as a ball boy? George housing that sundae at the tennis match? Jerry dating the lineswoman who is deaf? Tennis and “Seinfeld” go hand-in-hand.

“Psych” is standing in for every procedural that did a tennis episode. “Suits,” “Magnum P.I.,” “Hart to Hart,” and on and on. “Psych” did an episode about a tennis player who goes missing, and we are using this as the stand-in because “Psych” is a really good show.

Spinning off from “The Six-Million Dollar Man,” the plot of “The Bionic Woman” is remarkably straightforward and reasonable. A professional tennis player is seriously injured in a skydiving accident and is given cybernetic (“bionic”) implants that make her effectively a superhero. What do you need, a road map? Jaime Sommers was a little too busy to play much tennis once she was The Bionic Woman, but that was the starting point.

You may have completely forgotten “Phenom,” which is fair because it aired for one season in the ‘90s, but it was on ABC so it was a network sitcom. The show focuses on a single mom and her three kids, one of whom is a 15-year-old tennis prodigy. Weirdly, William Devane was uncredited, even though he had a main role, reportedly because if he couldn’t be top billed, he didn’t want to be billed at all. But he seems like such a normal guy who would never, say, do ads for scammy companies.

We’ll end here because the movie is new and, frankly, we’re surprised it took until 2026 to get the tennis-to-pickleball movie. In this Apple TV movie, Jake Johnson stars as a past-his-prime tennis player who makes the transition to playing pickleball. “The Dink” is self-aware enough that Johnson’s character ends up playing to save a local club like in a by-the-numbers ‘80s movie, which is a sign there could be some fun to be had here.