Challengers Throuple Memes Have Taken Over the Internet. These Are Our Favorite So Far

Throuples, your time has come: Challengers is officially in theaters, and the resulting fervor has inspired no shortage of excellent memes.

If you somehow haven’t already rushed to the theater to see the film, a quick recap: It follows tennis player-turned-coach Tashi (Zendaya), who has turned her husband Art (Mike Faist) into a top-tier athlete. However, following a mid-career injury, he’s currently on a losing streak, so Tashi enters him into a “challenger” event, and his competitor is none other than Art’s estranged best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend Patrick (Josh O’Connor), with whom they both have… tension, to say the least.

As my colleague James Factora noted, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s film is just one of the many messy bisexual love triangles currently making waves in pop culture. However, I’d argue that Challengers is perhaps the most high-profile example yet, utilizing a love triangle to deliver a thrilling, deliriously fun queer sports drama. To paraphrase Janelle Monáe’s “Screwed,” everything is sex, except sex, which is tennis.

Naturally, the movie left plenty of viewers reminiscing about their own favorite would-be pop culture polycules, from The Talented Mr. Ripley to Twilight. This prompted scores of X users to share these threesomes in memes of their own, often alongside the caption, “Three tickets to Challengers, please.”

Of course, the major difference between these pairings and Challengers is that, in Challengers, the sexual and romantic ties — and often codependency — between all three leads are explicit and integral to the movie’s DNA.

“I do think these characters are intertwined,” Zendaya recently told Queerty when asked about the film’s queerness. “And we’re still trying to figure out if it’s love, if it’s lust, if it’s desire, if it’s hatred — I don’t know what it is between all three of [the characters] that holds them so closely with each other, but I think Luca saw it beautifully and portrayed it beautifully.”

I’ll take one messy queer throuple blockbuster per calendar year, please!

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Originally Appeared on them.