Sydney Sweeney’s new biopic Christy failed to break into the top 10 at the box office in its opening weekend, taking just $1.3million in North America.
Indeed, with $1.305million from 2,011 cinemas – a per-theatre average of just $649 – it’s had one of the worst openings on record and finished the weekend in 11th place domestically.
The movie, which was released on Friday (November 7), sees Sweeney as former professional boxer Christy Martin on her journey to becoming the most famous female boxer in the US in the 1990s and her coach-turned-husband’s attempted murder of her in 2010.
The movie has received mixed reviews from critics, with 67 per cent on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 60 on Metacritic. And when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival two months ago, it was described as a “cliched boxing biopic” by The Guardian and “so rote that even an A.I. wouldn’t dare try to pass it off as original” by The Daily Beast.
Sweeney hit back, however, describing herself as “proud” of Christy on Instagram alongside a series of behind-the-scenes shots. She wrote that she was “proud to represent someone as strong and resilient as Christy Martin.”
She said: “If Christy gave even one woman the courage to take her first step toward safety, then we will have succeeded. So yes I’m proud. Why? Because we don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact.”
Having more success at the box office over the weekend was Predator: Badlands, the ninth instalment in the Predator franchise. It grossed $40million domestically and $80million worldwide.
Last week, meanwhile, Sweeney spoke out about the American Eagle jeans controversy that followed the “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” ad campaign earlier this year. She told GQ that she refused to issue a statement at the time because “I’ve always believed that I’m not here to tell people what to think.”
At the time, some people on social media alleged that the “jeans” and “genes” pun being part of an advertising campaign featuring a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman promoted eugenics and white supremacy, and even US President Donald Trump was asked about the ad.
Sweeney’s next movie, The Housemaid, is out on December 19 in the US and a week later in the UK, while she’s also been rumoured to appear in The Devil Wears Prada 2 in 2026 (via TMZ). The third season of teen drama Euphoria is slated to come out in the spring, too, and Sweeney said last month that the idea of her no longer working on the show leaves her feeling “terrified”.
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