The ‘Christy’ Box Office Flop Proves That Sydney Sweeney Is Not a Star… Yet

Christy did not do well. The biopic of the boxing pioneer Christy Martin had its world premiere at TIFF in September amid months of pre-release hype and whispers of Oscar nominations. Reviews were solid enough out of the fest, but it paled in comparison to other awards season favourites. Last week, it received its official release and it bombed hard, opening at a mere 11th place, earning less money than Tron: Ares did in its fifth week of release. It grossed less than a Zachary Levi movie in the year 2025. Indeed, according to Box Office Mojo, it’s one of the worst wide openings in history. The post-flop PR cleanup is in full effect, with some writers showing the email requests for spin they’ve been receiving from the movie’s harried publicity team. The spotlight has also, inevitably, fallen upon the star of Christy and the elephant in the room alongside her. Sorry, it’s time for another round of Sydney Sweeney discourse.

The post-release spin of Christy is pretty typical for an indie film. It’s not uncommon for someone like me to receive publicist emails asking me to, for example, highlight a movie’s good audience score on Rotten Tomatoes if it’s not doing well at the box office. Sometimes, you see people screenshotting them for an easy social media dunk, but it certainly felt different this time around. This is partly because spinning ‘well, the tiny portion of people who saw our flop didn’t hate it’ is just funny, but also because of, you know, all that stuff.

It’s not just us hot-takes merchants who have had fun with this. I’ve been surprised by the number of celebrities slyly or openly dunking on Sweeney, from a Jon Stewart segment on The Daily Show to Dan Stevens sharing an Instagram story calling out Sweeney’s ‘not having a stance’ position on politics. It’s usually considered uncouth to deride a colleague by name, and yet this is exactly what’s happening. The goodwill Sweeney had accrued has dissipated through her own smarm.

What made Sweeney so intriguing before all of the drama unfolded was her candour about her ambition. She was open about making strategic decisions that would bolster her career and allow her to become a big star. There was no shyness around her desire to be a headliner and how the projects she aligned herself with were explicitly designed to make that happen. When Madame Web became the most laughed at flop of the moment, she was honest about why she signed onto something that seemed like a disaster from the get-go: it was a way for her to build good rapport with Sony and that helped her to get films like Anyone But You greenlit. From a purely strategic perspective, Sweeney’s savviness was fascinating. You’re typically advised to be more coy or outright deny your professional hunger. Sweeney never did, and it earned her support (see also her rom-com co-star Glen Powell for another example of open ambition in 2020s Hollywood.)

But said bluntness can feel cynical when one’s intentions become truer. It feels a hell of a lot more sinister to choose an Oscar-baity biopic about a gay woman when you’re on the red team. The vagueness and bland platitudes with which Sweeney discusses Martin’s life and identity in interviews could read as typical awards season bait, but now, how can you not view it as seedy appropriation in the name of self-satisfaction? Does Sweeney really care about the ways in which Martin was defined by her sexuality, or did she simply view it as a meaty role? She’s hardly alone in this, but admit it, knowing which way she votes adds a callousness to it all. Soon, she’ll play the legendary Kim Novak in a film about her relationship with Sammy Davis Jr. Another politically charged true story that’s pure actor bait, but does Sweeney understand how her own voting record doesn’t exactly distance her from the people who made that romance taboo?

But I think it’d be too easy to sum up the box office failure of Christy as a direct result of Sweeney’s unashamed controversies. It’s certainly satisfying to note how the red-hat-wearing creeps who hold her up as an anti-woke ideal were never going to pay money to see a film about a queer person. But the truth of the underperformance is more anodyne than that. It just wasn’t a great movie, audiences weren’t interested in another fighting biopic (see the disappointing grosses for The Smashing Machine), and Sweeney simply isn’t a big enough draw to make a big hit on her own. She’s not there yet.

It’s tempting to call time on Sweeney after this, but the odds are still in her favour. Next month, she’ll headline The Housemaid, an adaptation of the novel by Freida MacFadden and one of the biggest books of the decade so far. This is a multi-million-selling author whose fame is rooted in virality thanks to the explosion of BookTok. Think of her as the Colleen Hoover of bad suspense novels. If any film is all but guaranteed to be a hit at the box office regardless of its stars, it is The Housemaid, and any success it has will inspire a slew of ‘Sydney’s back’ headlines.

At some point, I feel like Sweeney has to speak out and say something about her politics and beliefs. The mealy-mouthed ‘not taking a stance but 100% taking a stance’ rhetoric doesn’t work in 2025. We know what it really means. Moreover, it’s a reminder that aligning oneself, subtly or otherwise, with a political demographic that only views art as a series of gotchas in an endless bad-faith ‘culture war’ is simply bad for business. Spoiler alert: the guys claiming your boobs are an anti-woke symbol and who think ‘good jeans’ is a great slogan are not going to see your movie about a lesbian boxer who battled domestic violence. They’re the same ones who thought your nun horror movie was sacrilegious.

Hollywood is, of course, not the left-wing beacon of progressiveness that it’s often seen as, but if you’re going to be a Republican in it, you better be either a commercial safe bet or a beloved person among your peers. Right now, Sweeney has big people in her corner, like Jeff Bezos, but I question if there’s a true audience for her in this moment. Maybe season three of Euphoria will boost her flagging fortunes. But whatever the case, the untouchable glow of stardom she seeks is still out of her reach, and that will impact the choices she makes going forward.