During this past weekend’s onslaught of exciting new 2026 movie releases, GOAT provides some family-friendly fun that basketball fans will especially appreciate. While it’s called roarball in the animated movie from the Spider-Verse studio, it’s absolutely a love letter to the sport. One thing I particularly enjoyed was seeing the sport feature a co-ed team in a world where male-led sports is still the most dominant. The GOAT filmmakers shared some interesting insight about how they made that decision.
CinemaBlend attended a press day at Sony Animation Pictures where the co-directors Tyree Dillihay, Adam Rosette and producer Michelle Raimo-Kouyate sat down for a Q&A. As Dillihay explained:
The league from the very beginning was going to be co-ed because it’s true to the animal kingdom. Like you can have alpha females, you can have beta males, and vice versa. The second part of that was the conventional ways for a younger male mentee to be. For his hero [was] an older male, we’ve seen that, we’ve done that. Wouldn’t it be more interesting and provide more emotional stakes, etc. if it was a younger male mentee with an older female mentor? Like, that just presents amazing opportunities.
GOAT, which is obviously a play on the “greatest of all time” acronym, follows a goat named Will, who’s hero is a black panther roarball champion named Jett Fillmore. Fillmore happens to be a female character (voiced by Gabrielle Union) who is dealing with her career starting to slow down due to age.
There’s been a ton of sports movies over the years about a male idol and/or a male mentor/mentee relationship, but in the animal kingdom, there’s a variety of female animals that are considered more sporty than the males, so it presents the perfect opportunity. For example, female black panthers are responsible for hunting and taking care of their young, while the males hunt purely for their own survival.
During the conversation about the co-ed team in GOAT, we learned that it took seven years to produce. Within that time, the filmmakers got to experience the huge surge of the WNBA in the past couple of years, which only helps underline the movie’s messages. Dillihay said the “world caught up” with them while they were in production before saying this:
No one could have expected the explosion in the mainstream of women’s basketball over the last four years. And literally, we were like yeah it’s just right on time. Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, the whole college explosion, NIL happening, the A’ja Wilson’s, Angel Reese’s of the world like doing great things, Sabrina Iconescu competing with Stephen Curry at the All-Star Game.
More than ever, sports fans are watching women play sports such as basketball in a huge way, and it’s pretty awesome that GOAT is part of that. Caitlin Clark has specifically helped increase the popularity of women’s basketball in a term coined the “Caitlin Clark effect” specifically after she set tournament records due to her long-range three-point shooting.
Other female players, like Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, Sabrina Ionescu and A’ja Wilson, have shown it’s no longer just a man’s game. The movie also features Reese as Propp (a polar bear player from the Shivers team) and Wilson as Kouyate (an American alligator from the Shadows team) in cameo roles. Dillihay also added:
Going to your first basketball game, your first sporting event, that’s a very core memory for a child, and to experience it with his mom, and they have that shared experience, that’s special… in that moment of when Will sees Jet for the first time in, in the fur, if you will, and he’s looking at her and he said, ‘That’s going to be me, mom. I’m gonna be just like her.’ Like that’s a very powerful statement for a little boy to make that his hero is a woman.
While men and women are separate in most sporting events, there’s something really cool about seeing male and female characters on the same team in GOAT, especially with the storyline of Jett being the star player. I love learning it was a concept made for the movie very early on and only strengthens the movie’s messages. You can check out our GOAT review here on CinemaBlend and see it in theaters now.