Going Down the ‘Spider-Man to Tennis Pipeline’
With Challengers finally coming out April 26, a great prophecy has been fulfilled. As @blthsdaya pointed out on Twitter, every primary Spider-Man love interest has gone on to do a tennis movie. Why? What’s going on there?
It started with Kirsten Dunst, as many of the best things do. She played Mary Jane in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Movies, then starred in Wimbledon opposite Paul Bettany. Then Emma Stone did Battle of the Sexes after getting fridged out of the Amazing Spider-Man universe. Finally, we have Zendaya doing Challengers after her time in the MCU.
What can we glean from this trend? Only the primary Spider-Man love interests go on to tennis glory. Bryce Dallas Howard, Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man 3, has yet to don the tennis whites. Maybe in Argylle 2. The Venoms don’t really have any correlations. Topher Grace hasn’t played twin gangsters (one queer), and Tom Hardy hasn’t recut even one Star Wars movie at the time of publication.
Both Stone and Zendaya made their tennis movie three years after their last Spider-Man (unless MJ comes back to the MCU, which is entirely possible). Wimbledon actually came out the same year as Spider-Man 2, making this the quickest spider-to-tennis transition. Both Dunst and Stone have also played 18th century aristocrats (Marie Antoinette and The Favourite) and journalists (Civil War and The Help). Clearly Zendaya needs to play a reporter who falls in love with a prince in a gender-swapped Roman Holiday. Dunst played an adult woman in a child’s body in Interview With the Vampire, and Stone did the opposite in Poor Things. Both Zendaya and Dunst were child stars, but only Zendaya was in a reboot of Zapped.
There are two other ways this triumvirate has completely overlapped. All three actors have also voiced internet-beloved femme icons: Dunst Kiki of Kiki’s Delivery Service, Zendaya Lola Bunny, and Stone a shoe in Julio Torres’ My Favorite Shapes. And all three Spider-GFs have had long, public romances that people were weird about. But that’s just Hollywood, baby.