Muhammad Ali was one of the most captivating athletes and public figures of the 20th century. The heavyweight champion boxer of the world for much of the 1960s and ’70s, he made his mark not just on sports, but on pop culture, religion, and politics. Now, the most comprehensive adaptation of his life story ever is coming to Prime Video in less than two weeks.
The Greatest stars Jaalen Best (All American: Homecoming) as Ali, tracing his life from his early days in Tennessee as Cassius Clay, to his emergence as an amateur and professional boxer, to his transformation into the motor-mouthed Muhammad Ali and the shocking prize fights that made him a worldwide superstar. The first season will focus on Ali’s early career, including his boyhood, his gold medal win at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, and his two fateful meetings with world heavyweight champ Sonny Liston. The series was shot on location in Ontario, Canada, with filming taking place in Toronto, Hamilton, and Cobourg. Season 1 of The Greatest will consist of eight episodes; all eight will be released exclusively on Prime Video on November 4.
The series also stars Omari Hardwick (Power) and Dana Gourrier (The Hateful Eight) as Ali’s parents, Cassius Clay Sr. and Odessa Clay; Giovanni Ribisi (Avatar) as Ali’s longtime trainer, Angelo Dundee; Amin Joseph (Snowfall) as rival boxer Liston; Michael Ealy (Barbershop) as political and religious leader Malcolm X, who inspired Ali to join the Nation of Islam; Reno Wilson (Dexter: Original Sin) as Ali’s cornerman, Drew Bundini Brown; and Chris Jericho (Terrifier 3) as legendary professional wrestler Gorgeous George.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Who Are the Creatives Behind ‘The Greatest’?
The Greatest is created, showrun, and directed by Ben Watkins, who showruns and executive produces the Prime Video crime thriller series Cross. The series is produced in collaboration with the estate of Ali, who died in 2016; his widow, Lonnie Ali, executive produces the series. Other executive producers include Michael B. Jordan and Elizabeth Raposo for Outlier Society, plus Josh Wakely, Corey Salter, Marc Rosen, Matthew Gross, Michele Anthony, and Boyd Muir.
The Greatest will premiere on Prime Video on November 4. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.
The Greatest
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Jaalen Best
Enjoying this article? Support our work with a small crypto donation.Muhammad Ali
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Lacey Creighton
Stenographer
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Amin Joseph
Sonny Liston
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Jim Chad
Louisville Sponsoring Group Member
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