Chris & Martina: The Final Set
Director: Rebecca Gitlitz | Cast: Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova | Year: 2026 | Where to Watch: Netflix | Genre: Documentary
What This Film Actually Does
Rebecca Gitlitz's 2026 documentary isn't a highlight reel. It's something messier and more human — a film about two women who spent decades competing, then quietly became each other's closest confidant. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova faced off hundreds of times across nearly two decades, but Gitlitz skips past the scoreboard entirely. She's after the thing that happens between matches: the mutual respect that built slowly, the crises both women weathered off court, the way a rivalry can transform into the defining friendship of a person's life.
The film doesn't look away from the harder parts. Navratilova's cancer diagnoses. Evert's health scare. Those sequences carry real weight — not as dramatic turning points, but as moments where two people leaned on each other while facing their own mortality. That's where the documentary finds its pulse.
How Gitlitz Built This
The smartest decision Gitlitz made? Let Evert and Navratilova do the talking. The film is built largely on extended, unscripted conversations between the two women, cut against archival footage spanning the 1970s through the early 2000s. No parade of talking-head analysts. No commentary from sports journalists. Just the two of them — sometimes watching old match footage together, disagreeing about what they remember, laughing at moments that once felt painful.
Navratilova especially doesn't hold back. She never has (that's part of why she's remarkable), and here she's as candid as she gets. Evert, by contrast, stays measured and precise — she chooses her words carefully, sometimes pausing mid-thought to reconsider what she just said. Together, they create a dynamic that the film wisely refuses to flatten.
What makes this feel grounded instead of hagiographic is the access. Gitlitz clearly spent serious time earning their trust before rolling cameras. You can feel it in the unguarded moments — the long takes where the camera just holds on one woman's face while the other speaks, resisting the urge to cut away. It's a small thing. It accumulates.
Why This Matters in the Sports Documentary Space
The genre is crowded right now, and most of these films follow the same formula: rise, competition, crisis, redemption, slow-motion footage set to strings. Chris & Martina doesn't entirely escape that gravity, but it earns its departures.
What's striking is how Gitlitz handles silence and space. There are moments where the film just breathes. The editing resists the urge to fill every gap with music or voiceover. At this stage of their lives, both Evert and Navratilova are genuinely interesting thinkers about their own histories — they're not performing nostalgia, they're actually working something out in real time.
The thing nobody mentions enough about this film is how it treats the cancer storylines not as dramatic pivots but as something more complicated: a reckoning with mortality that both women processed partly by leaning on each other. It's the kind of material that doesn't usually make it into sports documentaries. And it's why this one feels different.
Movie OTT flagged this early as essential viewing — not just for tennis fans, but for anyone who finds sports documentaries most compelling when the sport almost disappears. The documentary's real subject is friendship, survival, and what it means to have someone in your life who truly understands the cost of what you've been through.
Where to Stream It
Chris & Martina: The Final Set is exclusively on Netflix. All Netflix subscribers can watch it at no extra cost — it's in the documentary section. No rental, no purchase required.
Netflix positioned this as one of its major 2026 sports documentary releases, so it should stay available on the platform. If you don't have a subscription yet, this is worth factoring into a free trial. Seriously.
Movie OTT's streaming tracker keeps a live monitor on availability across platforms — Netflix, Prime Video, Hotstar — so if the rights shift, you'll find the update there first.
Key Details
- Release Date: 2026
- Director: Rebecca Gitlitz
- Subjects: Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova
- Runtime: Not specified in available sources
- Rating: 0/10 on IMDb (too recent for meaningful audience data)
Who Should Watch This
If you followed Evert and Navratilova during their playing years, this film will hit differently. There's a particular ache in watching people you've admired for decades be this honest about aging, about loss, about becoming something other than competitors.
But you don't need to be a tennis fan. This works for anyone who cares about friendship, resilience, and what it looks like when two people who've known the best and worst of each other finally have time to just talk. We don't get many sports documentaries that feel this human.
Watch it. Don't wait for the awards season buzz or the critical consensus to build. The film is available now, and it's the kind of thing that rewards watching when it's still fresh.
