Queen of the Ring (2025)

[BluBonnet]

Wow. I thoroughly enjoyed Emily Bett Rickards in the CWverse shows, and this is getting good reviews already...

Really looking forward to this!

‘Queen of the Ring’ Review: Emily Bett Rickards Brings Soul and Strength to Female Wrestling Biopic

Wrestling pics are having a moment. Last year saw the excellent, if unjustly ignored, The Iron Claw, about the ill-fated Von Erich brothers. Now comes Ash Avildsen’s hugely entertaining, old-fashioned biopic about Mildred Burke. If you don’t know who Burke is (and the vast majority probably don’t), this film aims to correct that. A pioneer of the sport who became the first million-dollar female athlete in history, Burke was a three-time women’s world champion from the 1930s through the 1950s, a time when women’s wrestling wasn’t even legal in most of the country. Her story fairly demands to be told, and Queen of the Ring, which served as the opening night film of the 39th annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, largely does it justice.

Based on Jeff Leen’s extravagantly titled 2009 book The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend (try fitting that on a marquee), the film stars Emily Bett Rickards (Arrow) in a breakout performance as Burke. We first see her as an unwed teenage mother working as a waitress in a Kansas diner under the watchful eye of her mother (Cara Buono). But Millie, who possesses a formidable muscularity, has dreams of becoming an entertainer. And since she can’t sing or dance, she figures that wrestling is her way out of the boonies.