Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers hit theaters just a few days ago, and it’s clear that the wait was worth it. The sexy drama stars Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor as tennis players who wind up in a love triangle.
How? Well, Challengers follows Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a tennis prodigy who becomes a coach after suffering a career-ending injury. After her retirement, Tashi coaches her husband, Art Donaldson (Faist), and transforms him into a star player—but he’s on a losing streak. To snap him out of it, Tashi signs Art up for a challengers event, but her plan unravels when he competes against Patrick Zweig (O’Connor), his former best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend.
Messy, right? Since the film’s premiere on April 26, the Internet has been ablaze with questions. (We had a few, too.) Most important: Will there be a sequel? Unfortunately, the jury’s still out on a rematch. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but Challengers concludes its story on a somewhat ambiguous note, with Tashi watching Art and Patrick battle it out on the court. O’Connor told Entertainment Weekly that the final scene was meant to bring the tennis trio back together. “At the end of the film, they have found each other,” he said. “They’ve all been searching for a way and getting it terribly wrong, searching for a way to satisfy that need, that hunger for each other.”
Does that mean Challengers has set the stakes for another game? Don’t count on it. Guadagnino hasn’t revealed any plans for a sequel. While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the director emphasized the purpose of the ending as a means to round out the story—rather than, presumably, to set up another Challengers entry. “I needed to get this very, very visually amped up and really immersed for the audience to understand how much it meant for them not to win over the other but to be back together,” he said. “All of them.”
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