Wrestling Biopic Queen of the Ring Doesn't Do the Job

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Queen of the Ring, a new biopic about 20th century pro wrestling legend Mildred Burke, is like a portal into the past. Not to Burke’s Depression-era and post-war heyday, even though that’s when it’s set, but to the days when the TV networks produced a steady stream of original TV movies, almost all of which were instantly forgotten. Queen of the Ring might be playing in theaters right now, but it’s the most made-for-TV movie I’ve seen in a while.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Pro wrestling history is weird and fascinating and should be a goldmine for Hollywood, with its mixture of fact and fiction, its close proximity to outright criminality, and the always unsteady business relationships between its network of regional promoters. There have been maybe two good non-documentaries about wrestling ever, though, and both are about fictional characters. And Mildred Burke—the focus of Queen of the Ring, and one of the biggest stars in the business during a boom period for women’s wrestling—makes an ideal subject for a film.

Unfortunately Ash Avildsen, Queen of the Ring’s writer and director, directs it like one of those old network TV movies. It’s a straightforward, surface-level summary of Burke’s career and personal life, with many facts changed or elided over for dramatic effect. And yet the drama remains inert throughout, despite Burke’s genuinely compelling life and fine performances from most of its cast. Blame the awkward, clunky, expository dialogue, the newsreel-style montages that try to add zip but look cheap and ring false, and the emphasis on a feud with an antagonist whose actor brings little to the role. It’s all perfunctory, paint-by-numbers, and played out, without the spark or personality that separates journeyman wrestlers from the real stars.

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Emily Bett Rickards, the movie’s star, deserves better. She’s able to sell Burke’s physical and emotional resilience, from the desperation and ambition that drives her into wrestling, to the power and grace of her matches, to the disappointment and pragmatism with which Burke faces betrayal. Josh Lucas, a perfect Hollywood version of what’s called a “good hand” in the wrestling business, channels the charisma and cruelty of Billy Wolfe, the small-time carnival wrestler who trained, managed, married, abused and betrayed Burke. The rest of the cast are generally given a single note to play—Francesca Eastwood as the take-no-shit Mae Young, Deborah Ann Woll as the spitfire Gladys Gillem, Damaris Lewis as the proud Babs Wingo—and yet they all make an impression despite their limited characters. They all deserve a better movie.

You can get a glimpse of that better movie during the 10 or so minutes that Walton Goggins is on screen. This superlative scene-stealer waltzes in at about the 25 minute mark, playing the controversial promoter Jack Pfefer, and the pulse immediately picks up. His few scenes are consistently the movie’s best; as solid as the rest of the cast is, he’s perhaps the only actor here who captures the showmanship that really defines professional wrestling. It’s unfortunate that in a movie about a pioneering women’s wrestler—really, the first major star in women’s wrestling—the moment that most captures the spark of pro wrestling is a scene exclusively involving men, when Goggins’ Pfefer helps Gorgeous George (Adam Demos) and Jim Mitchell (Khalid Greenaway) find the drama in their dueling promos, prompting and provoking them until their tentative deliveries turn into over-the-top proclamations.

There’s a long tradition of casting actual wrestlers as background characters in movies about pro wrestling, and Queen of the Ring gladly plays its part. Wrestlers like Toni Rossall (AEW’s Toni Storm) and Trinity Fatu (WWE’s Naomi) get a few minutes of screentime, while Mickie James and Britt Baker get blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em background cameos. Jim Cornette, a formerly great wrestling booker, commentator and manager who’s become a bitter old crank, has multiple lines across several scenes as an unnamed National Wrestling Alliance commissioner who other characters address exclusively as “commissioner.”

The biggest role given to a pro wrestler is a crucial one, and is one of the major reasons Queen of the Ring underperforms. Kailey Farmer, who has wrestled under the name Kamille for both Billy Corgan’s NWA and AEW, plays June Byers, a top women’s star in the ‘50s and ‘60s who became Wolfe’s star attraction after he and Burke finally broke up in 1952. Byers was a real-life rival for Burke and the two had legitimate heat with each other; the two sides agreed to cooperate and make money off that real-life hatred, which resulted in an infamous 1954 match in Atlanta where cooperation broke down, leading to a finish that wasn’t the one they had apparently agreed on. A combination of professional politics over who got to hold the women’s world title and Burke’s personal grievances with Wolfe and Byers lead to an inconclusive finish that effectively let both women claim to be the champion; ultimately history favored Byers’ claim, as she went on to be the biggest women’s wrestler of the ‘50s and ‘60s, while Burke’s career and profile gradually faded throughout the ‘50s. Needless to say, Byers is a pivotal role in this story; it doesn’t necessarily require a great actor, but it should at least be played by somebody who can convincingly project any recognizable human emotion. Unfortunately Farmer isn’t up to the task; she turns Byers into an emotionless brick wall that Wolfe tosses up in front of Burke, less a person than a boss from an ‘80s beat-em-’up game. That Atlanta match is positioned as the movie’s emotional climax—it opens and closes the whole picture—and Farmer’s absolute cipher of a villain makes that climax fall flat.

The Byers character is also central to the movie’s most baffling and unnecessary decision. In order to make Byers seem especially villainous—to get more heat on her, as they’d say in wrestling—Avildsen has her beat Woll’s likable wrestler Gillem to death during a match. In real life, Gillem died at the age of 89 in 2009, over a decade after Byers died. Queen of the Ring kills Gladys “Kill ‘Em” Gillem 57 years before the real world did, purely to ratchet up the stakes and make Byers look even more like a villain—and then does almost nothing with it. Gillem’s death is glossed over quickly and never accentuated afterward, resulting in an absurdly ahistorical plot point that’s incompetently delivered.

Avildsen also likes to squeeze little nods to wrestling history into the film, even if they don’t need to be there. Characters just kind of show up, not because they serve the film or story, but as nerdy Easter eggs for wrestling fans. The most egregious example comes during an NWA board meeting, when the old men who run the business refuse to work with Burke after her split with Wolfe. A promoter we’ve never seen before delivers a passionate little rebuke to Burke’s case; when Burke indignantly asks who he is, an exasperated Cornette loudly announces that it’s Vince McMahon (not the one currently being sued for sex crimes, but his father). They might as well have pyro and an onscreen chyron when Cornette says the name. (Avildsen cast himself as McMahon, naturally.)

Between that lack of subtlety, the willingness to make shit up, and the general cheapness of the whole production, Queen of the Ring really does feel like an old TV movie-of-the-week. Burke’s life could make for a genuinely great movie, but this isn’t it. It’s not nearly as bad at making stuff up as that terrible Jesse Ventura TV movie from 1999, but the fact that Queen of the Ring made me think of that disaster more than once is a sign of how bad this movie can be. Burke and most of these actors deserved better.

Director: Ash Avildsen
Writer: Ash Avildsen
Stars: Emily Bett Rickards, Josh Lucas, Tyler Posey, Walton Goggins, Francesca Eastwood, Marie Avgeropoulos, Deborah Ann Woll, Cara Buono, Kailey Farmer, Damaris Lewis, Adam Demos, Michael Kove, Kelli Berglund
Release Date: March 7, 2025

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

Wrestling Biopic Queen of the Ring Doesn’t Do the Job