Forget neo-westerns, crime thrillers, and sci-fi; the sneaky huge genre quietly taking over streaming of late has been the sports comedy. So many platforms have been exploring the bounds of football, golf, and more for laughs, from Netflix with the long-awaited Happy Gilmore 2 and the upcoming series The Hawk starring Will Ferrell to Hulu with the underrated Chad Powers, led by Glenn Powell. Apple TV has also been part of this run on all things sports entertainment, finding success with its own Owen Wilson-driven golf vehicle Stick, which will be back for Season 2, and, of course, Ted Lasso, which is gearing up for Season 4 this year on August 5. However, in just one month, it’ll finally take on a rising sport that’s rapidly taken the spotlight in the 2020s.
On July 24, The Dink will thrust Jake Johnson into the ever-growing world of pickleball as washed-up former tennis prodigy Dusty Boyd. Once destined for athletic greatness, Dusty now spends his days begrudgingly teaching kids the game at his strict father Chuck’s (Ed Harris) country club, until an injury takes away his ability to play altogether. Fortunately, the hot new sport sweeping through the club just so happens to be great for rehab. Unfortunately for Dusty, though, he’s long shared his dad’s vendetta against pickleball as an inferior activity to the grace, skill, and class of tennis. Nonetheless, he gives it a try and, with the help of an energetic older partner named Candace (Mary Steenburgen), a new passion begins to blossom in him. Apple TV has now shared the official trailer teasing Dusty’s underdog journey to find belonging, confront his athletic failures, and earn his dad’s affection.
The trailer opens with Chuck Boyd declaring war on the pickleball epidemic sweeping the courts and tainting the very sanctity of tennis. His overly dogmatic hatred of the table tennis-like game rubs off on Dusty in some nasty ways, like bullying the older pickleballers just trying to have fun. In fact, before embracing the game, Dusty isn’t the most pleasant to be around at all, riding his hot shot status as “The Hammer” and brutally schooling elderly men on the tennis courts. Then, his injury earns him a prescription courtesy of Ben Stiller for pickleball, and everything starts to change. At first, struggling to get a handle on the game and its gentler touch, he hits his stride and finds a surprising community with Candace and his pickleball adversaries, even as his dad declares the game emblematic of humanity’s decline. Fighting for this upstart sport eventually lands him the ultimate chance at redemption when his childhood rival and tennis legend Andy Roddick steps on the scene, setting the stage for a clash with everything on the line for Dusty.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
‘The Dink’ Explores Ego, Purpose, and Friendship in a Very Silly Package
Filling out the rest of the star-studded comedic roster for The Dink are Patton Oswalt, Chloe Fineman, Chris Parnell, and Aaron Chen, as well as standouts like Lynne Marie Stewart. Josh Greenbaum of Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar fame helmed the film from a script by Sean Clements, with Stiller serving as a producer. For Clements, the very silly story is based somewhat in reality, taking inspiration from his own experience rehabbing injuries by playing open mixers with retirees and forming some surprising connections along the way. He and Greenbaum detailed how the project came together to Collider’s Maggie Lovitt for our Exclusive Summer Preview series, from how Johnson got involved to how they landed just about every target for the cast. What ultimately excited the director most about the pickleball chaos was the emotional core of Dusty’s reinvention that underpins all the laughter.
“I felt like that sort of all was encapsulated in his script, but I always, even in the silliest comedies, I want the movie to be about something. So, I think underneath all the ridiculousness and the comedy, the movie is really about reinvention, about ego, certainly about friendship, and I think, really, for Dusty, the main character, it’s about trying to find purpose in a moment in life when maybe you thought your big shot had passed you by, so that combination of everything really just was exciting to me. A world that’s very, very funny, but characters whose stakes I think inside that world feel very real to them.”
The Dink hits the court on Apple TV on July 24. Check out the trailer in the player above.
