Entertainment Weekly‘s analysis of this weekend in the box office has something to say about the way that this movie, Sweeney’s third this year, may have not resonated with audiences, after making an abysmal million in its opening:
Among the weekend’s new releases, none did as poorly as Sydney Sweeney’s boxing biopic Christy. Though the beneficiary of an all-out marketing bonanza, the harrowing true-life story of champ Christy Martin earned a shockingly low $1.3 million in its premiere, not enough to even crack the top 10. With a release on just over 2,000 screens, that’s a pitiful per-theater-average of $649. Christy premiered to a good deal of acclaim at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, but now marks the star’s third movie this year to premiere well under $2 million, following Ron Howard’s Eden and Western Americana.
An instructive contrast comes in the case of Die My Love, the new film from renowned Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsay. Like Christy, the film sports a starry cast in Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, premiered at a prestigious film festival (in this case Cannes), was acquired by a specialty distributor (Black Bear for Christy, MUBI for Die My Love), and was granted a generous marketing and publicity campaign. But unlike Die My Love, a polarizing and confrontational look at postpartum depression, Christy’s hopeful message of finding your voice and overcoming adversity was designed to appeal to audiences, not challenge them. Yet it’s Die My Love that cracked the top 10 this week, earning $2.8 million domestically to secure the No. 8 spot.
I am not actually super certain that there is a “backlash” to the way that Christy has been covered by critics, so I skeptically submit this bit of webjunk as your daily intake of outrage if what you really want is for women-led biopics to get their day in the sun, I guess? Heather Schwedel’s broadly negative review finds a way to express lukewarm interest in the Martin portrayal without the opprobrium of social media pile on that seems to haunt Sweeney’s output this year.
I can see how Sweeney’s performance here in Christy is sensitive and adept in ways that defy her stereotyping by media in the oversaturation cycle of celebrity ingénues. Christy is a queer, ceiling-breaking figure in the field of professional boxing, and the twists and turns in her life and career are ripe for dramatization. I saw this movie coincidentally after just having finished Joyce Carol Oates’s 1992 essay “The Cruelest Sport” for the NY review of books.
What makes Sweeney’s portrayal of Martin so interesting is the way in which she can plausibly seem like the underdog so often while also acting like a complete dick. In the first fifteen minutes of the movie she seems like she is going to get the stuffing kicked out of her before a reversal. The choreography of her fights, the chameleon-like way in which Sweeney recedes into a person who is conditioned to be emotive only as a means of hiding her true desires and needs, the constant bad advice from friends and family, are all elements of a compelling autobiographical narrative for Sweeney herself, something she’s commented on in her own press for the movie. Probably the most interesting editing and structure to this movie is the story it chooses to tell before jumping to a new year, especially the Don King prediction that leads to a momentous turn for Christy Martin in the third act.
