In 1973, Billie Jean King faced off against Bobby Riggs in a tennis match watched by an estimated 90 million people worldwide. In 2017, Emma Stone and Steve Carrell are playing them in a movie called Battle of the Sexes.
The historical match was a showdown between the women’s tennis champ at the height of her career and a then 55-year-old former Wimbledon champion Riggs, who claimed he could still beat any woman player. After a lot of egging on in the media, King iconically agreed to a televised match with a winner-takes-all prize of $100,000 and then blew Riggs out of the water.
If “male chauvinist pig versus hairy-legged feminist” sounds like a familiar media narrative, it’s because it still is! The trailer makes the movie seem like it’s documenting one of the first big pop culture examples of a dynamic we now get to watch play out in our political system and on Twitter all day long.
It was directed by Little Miss Sunshine team Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris, and it seems like we can expect both That Good Drama and Some Dark Laughs:
Battle of the Sexes hits theaters Sept. 22.
H/T Jezebel