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If you’ve so much as opened your phone in the past two months, you’ve likely been hit with an avalanche of Challengers-related content: fan cams of the threesome in all imaginable configurations; fanart in a wide variety of styles, TikToks about dancing like Zendaya to attract a man (maybe even two); compilations of the cast and their “top tier chemistry”; and a seemingly never-ending discourse about hidden meanings and analyses that purport to go, for lack of better words, balls deep. It seems that Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s most recent feature film, has precipitated a Marvel-style mass hysteria among the girls and the gays, paralleled only by the likes of Barbie. 

Challengers is the latest in what seems to be a distinct trend in filmgoing culture – one where audiences of non-blockbuster films are transformed from consumers to crazed fans. It happened with Emerald Fennell’s thriller, Saltburn, earlier this year, which was chopped up for fancams, flattened into Tumblr-friendly stills, and hotly debated in threads on X. It seems to be happening again, albeit to a lesser extent, in anticipation for the release of The Bikeriders, starring heartthrob Austin Butler. 

For cynics like myself, the impulse is to roll your eyes at this frenzied response. As literature gets sucked into the social media maelstrom, with TikTok turning reading into sport, moviegoers are concerned that film will suffer a similar fate. An initial glance at your apps will tell you that people have taken Challengers and given it the blockbuster treatment. So, in the same way Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett describes people on TikTok treating books as “totemic magical objects”, it feels like on the internet, a movie can never just be a movie. 

This phenomenon is not exactly new to film. Ever since Jaws, widely credited as the first blockbuster, came out almost five decades ago, commercial movies have been fetishised by audiences. As Charles R Acland puts it in his book, Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder, blockbusters are “complicated agglomerations of products, texts, merchandising, advertising, and career vehicles, all of which count on the success of these relatively few visible international big works.” 

Blockbusters have always been characterised by their cross-media marketability. The earliest blockbusters – Star Wars, E.T. – gave way to T-shirts, toys, Halloween costumes, video games and the like. But add the internet, which, on top of being a global marketplace, is home to thousands and thousands of virtual town halls (X being its biggest), and a whole new world of possibility opens up. This is how we got Barbie. 

But how did Challengers, a mid-budget film with only one A-lister in its billing, and which centres around a semi-homoerotic love triangle between three tennis players, get a response which, these days, is reserved exclusively for blockbusters? 

Perhaps it’s the prurient interests of small screen audiences who, less than half a decade ago, were populating our feeds with gifs of Connell’s chain in Normal People, and turning the costumes in Euphoria into a global fashion trend. Perhaps it’s less so the actual content of these shows or films and more a growing fandom culture kicked off by musical boy groups like One Direction and BTS and spreading into other forms of media. Ever more, the internet is picking a “white boy of the month” and “rodent boyfriend” to lust over – such as Dylan O’Brien, Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi, Paul Mescal and, most recently, Challengers stars, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. But, where Euphoria and Normal People feature explicit sex scenes with these heartthrobs, movies like Challengers and Saltburn do not. 

Challengers has sold itself as a sexy joyride with a whiff of danger. Its trailers feature slowed-down versions of kinky pop songs like Rihanna’s “S&M” and “Maneater” by Nelly Furtado, and place a heavy focus on the duplicitousness of Zendaya’s character, Tashi Duncan. Its posters zero in on a shot of the three leads, Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor, necking hungrily on a bed. The movie itself, however, is less torrid than it is teasing, more erotic thriller than full-on erotic. Yet, even still, audiences have taken to social media to proclaim their horniness. 

You could argue the same for Saltburn. Its shock-factor sexual content – like Barry Keoghan’s character slurping up the cummy bathwater left behind by his friend, or sticking his penis in the grave of that same, recently-deceased friend, is decidedly unsexy. The movie is never full on with its eroticism, but still elicited mania. How?

The proof may lie in the marketing. These days mid-budget films, which often rely on product placement, become a sort of marketing ouroboros – it’s less and less clear where the film ends and the marketing begins. Saltburn is a mid-budget film stuffed with hackneyed visuals and paper-thin characters that is desperately grasping for internet virality and, indeed, became a blockbuster-style sensation on social media. Every frame a Tumblr reblog. Every sex scene a gif primed for X. 

In many ways, Challengers looks like Saltburn. It’s littered with product placement, and for every Uniqlo jersey, Applebees cigarette, Taco Bell bag, Chanel-monogrammed slipper, or Coca-Cola there is an equal measure of flashy camerawork, blaring musical cues, and shots so quick it’s as if you never saw them. The film doesn’t need sex scenes because every formal element is there to maximise our pleasure. It’s sensory overload. 

Challengers also doesn’t try very hard to… well… challenge us. Its characters are 2D renderings of certain typologies. It does not have the political backdrop or tragic undercurrent of another erotic love triangle film like Y Tu Mama Tambien and, unlike Guadagnino’s other, slower-paced films, Challengers’ primary focus is the spectacle of itself. Really, it has more in common with a YA flick than it does with any of the films I just mentioned. But is that always a bad thing? 

Acland argues that blockbusters, above any other quality, are designed to be entertaining. He says that critics will often dismiss movies that are made for our pleasure but, for him, entertainment “produces a safety valve, letting off critical pressure to allow society to return to a stable and predictable state, and paving over unsettling truths.” These devices work to include the audience within the world of the film, and relieve some of our underlying cultural anxieties.

Challengers is not a blockbuster by definition, but it speaks the language of one. It’s constantly aware of its audience – opening up a dialogue with us through its sweeping camera movements, pounding score, and disjointed editing. It lets us in on the joke with its in-your-face innuendo, overly-choreographed intimate scenes (the rhythmic timing of the unconsummated threesome scene is almost comical), and cheeky, too-symmetrical shot composition. As critic Kaleigh Donaldson remarks, “you can practically hear Luca giggling off-camera”. Its characters care about sex and tennis alone, and they’re not ashamed of it. 

Movies these days feel tailor-made for social media virality. But Challengers proves that, sometimes, this can be a good thing. As opposed to a film like Saltburn, which dangles over us a deeper message than its creator is capable of providing, Challengers is a genre film that knows how artificial it is. It is aware of the context it exists in. Knowing that we not only live in a risk-averse film climate, but a sexless one too, it combines the noise of a blockbuster with the thoughtful mechanics of an erotic thriller, and whips us into a frenzy that turns us all, for better or worse, into giddy teenagers. And after years of repressed desire, the release feels good. Like a shameless sigh of relief after a great tennis match. 

The fun can’t last forever though. As adept as Challengers was at generating mega-hype for the dying mid-budget film, public response to the movie signals something potentially concerning about consumer behaviour. In an era of shrinking attention spans, prolonged adolescence, and toxic fandom culture, filmmakers may see the success of a movie like Challengers as the only way forward. Frothy romps as they may be, mid-budget movies disguised as blockbusters could give way to a film industry that tunes itself to the less-than-savoury aspects of the viewing public. Take this as a win, but please proceed with caution.