Chris & Martina: The Final Set premieres Wednesday at the Tribeca Film Festival and will drop on Netflix on June 26, bringing one of sport’s most durable rivalries back into public view with a new frame: friendship and survival.
Directed by two-time Emmy Award winner Rebecca Gitlitz, the documentary follows Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova decades after they played hundreds of matches against one another. The film moves between present and past and between Florida and Prague, tracing the arc from on‑court combat to the off‑court bond the two now share.
For viewers, the timing is simple: the first public screening comes at Tribeca on Wednesday; anyone who does not attend the festival can stream the full film on Netflix beginning June 26. Those are the fixed dates that determine when the film’s portrait — part sports chronicle, part personal reckoning — becomes widely available.
Gitlitz stages the movie as a conversation across time. It revisits the rivalry long billed as one of the most gripping in sports while cutting to the present, where Evert and Navratilova are described as dear friends, kindred spirits and cancer survivors decades after their last match. Where their contests once defined them against one another, the documentary leans toward a shared legacy.
That pivot is the film’s claim: two athletes who were routinely bracketed together by the press and the public now choose to lean into that pairing, reframing an adversarial past as a mutual story of endurance. The cinematography shuttles between practice courts and personal spaces, between archival footage and contemporary interviews, and between the coastal light of Florida and the streets of Prague — a geography that signals how far the two lives have traveled since their first meetings on tour.
The weight of the story rests on a handful of contrasts: matches that once sharpened their differences, and the late‑life intimacy that softens them; headline moments remembered by fans and quieter medical reckonings that only emerge as the film moves into the present. The documentary therefore asks viewers to measure both a public rivalry and private survival on the same scale.
Practical details for readers are straightforward. Festivalgoers can catch the premiere in Tribeca on Wednesday; Netflix subscribers should mark June 26 for the streaming release. Beyond dates, the film’s director is the clearest sign that the producers intend to balance craft with access — Gitlitz brings award‑level experience to a subject that depends on both archival retrieval and candid, contemporary exchange.
What remains deliberately unsettled is exactly what personal stories and archival moments the film will surface. The available descriptions outline structure and tone — present and past, Florida and Prague, rivalry and friendship — but stop short of listing specific matches, private conversations or previously unseen footage that might change how viewers remember Evert and Navratilova.
That omission is the film’s most consequential gap. The single most important unanswered question for audiences is which private revelations and archival sequences Chris & Martina: The Final Set will show that could finally recast a famous athletic rivalry as the kind of intimate partnership the film promises to reveal when it lands on Netflix on June 26.
