First Full Borg/McEnroe Trailer Released

The perfect rivalry is introduced in the new trailer for the upcoming sports drama Borg/McEnroe. The film will feature Shia LaBeouf as John McEnroe, with Sverrir Gudnason starring as his opponent Borg. The two tennis stars played 14 matches between the periods of 1978 and 1981, each winning seven; the film will tell the story of the 1980 Wimbledon Championships. 

The trailer begins by showing Borg playing tennis, with an announcer describing his face-off with McEnroe as the "perfect rivalry" between "the baseline player and the net rusher." It then flashes back to Borg's childhood, where he is told that tennis is a sport that might not be suited to his "level of society," something which clearly rubs him and his mother the wrong way. 

The child vows to become the best tennis player in the whole world, and, as the trailer shows, he is getting close to achieving that goal, becoming a very successful tennis player who is now heading into a possible history-making fifth Wimbledon win. All that is standing in his way is McEnroe, who an announcer describes as "the bigger talent." "But playing Borg is like being hit by a sledgehammer," the announcer says.

As the trailer shows, Borg is struggling with public perception that he is a machine with no emotions, while McEnroe appears to show his emotions very publicly as he plays, loudly fighting with the refs during the match. "You don't understand what the f*** it takes to play tennis," McEnroe tells reporters. "You know I go out there and I give everything for this game? Everything in me gets left on that f***ing court. And none of you understand it because none of you do it." As for Borg, he has to learn to channel his emotions into the game. "All that rage, all that fear, the panic you must be feeling," he is told in Swedish. "Load it into every stroke." 

Stellan Skarsgard, Tuva Novotny, Ian Blackman, Tuva Novotny, and Borg's son Leo, who will play him as a young boy, also star in the film, which is directed by Janus Metz (True Detective) based on a script from Ronnie Sandahl (Underdog). The movie is set for a September release in Sweden, but it does not have a U.S. release date yet. While we wait for the two giants to enter the court, see some of the other movies we are looking forward to seeing this year.