Christy Crashes: Sydney Sweeney Faces Historic Box-Office Drop No Jeans Can Fix
Christy is on the ropes: Sydney Sweeney’s boxing biopic cratered in its second weekend with just $108,000, leaving a worldwide total of $1.95 million despite her all-in turn as Christy Martin.
Welp. Sydney Sweeney swung big with Christy and the box office swung back harder. Weekend two was a faceplant: about $108k (per World of Reel), bringing the worldwide total to just $1.95 million (via The Numbers). For a TIFF crowd-pleaser with a star who clearly trained her guts out to play boxing legend Christy Martin, that is rough.
What is Christy?
David Michod directs. Sydney Sweeney stars alongside Ben Foster and Merritt Wever. It opened November 7, 2025, runs 135 minutes, and landed a curious Rotten Tomatoes split: critics at 66%, audiences at a sky-high 97%. The early festival chatter was warm, but the theatrical reality has been ice cold.
So what went wrong?
- Timing and competition: It ran smack into Predator: Badlands and Die My Love, both of which vacuumed up attention and screens.
- Marketing misfire: The rollout felt thin — basically one major trailer and not much else. Hard to open a biopic without a steady drumbeat.
- The movie itself: Sweeney sells the transformation, but the film reportedly drags and has technical hiccups. Word-of-mouth matters when you are not a four-quadrant brand.
- Star power ceiling: Sweeney is everywhere, but being ubiquitous and being a box office opener are not the same thing. She is not a guaranteed ticket-seller yet.
- Genre headwinds: Sports biopics are a tougher sell in 2025. Post-pandemic habits have nudged a lot of these stories to streaming comfort-view territory.
- The plunge: That second-weekend drop is one of the nastiest I can remember for a wide release; $108k is a number you do not want to see in week two.
About that Great Jeans controversy
In the run-up to release, Sweeney got pulled into a very 2025 kind of ad dust-up. An American Eagle spot used the line: "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans." Some people read it as a wink at "genes" and racial superiority because she is blonde and blue-eyed. When GQ asked her about it, she tried to keep it neutral:
"I have always believed that I am not here to tell people what to think... When I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear."
Did that directly sink Christy? Probably not on its own. But it absolutely hijacked part of the movie’s crucial promo window — the exact moment when a niche, adult-leaning biopic needs all the oxygen it can get.
The bottom line
Christy had the festival buzz, the performance commitment, and a crowd-pleasing audience score. It also had brutal competition, thin marketing, and a genre uphill climb. Add a distracting pre-release controversy and you get a movie that never found its lane. It hurts to say it, but the numbers tell the story: $1.95 million worldwide so far, and a second weekend that barely moved the needle.
Christy is currently playing in theatres (USA).