Simu Liu Admits His First Major Loss as Shang-Chi — to Sydney Sweeney

Simu Liu cracked a pretty great joke the other day about losing an award to Sydney Sweeney, and honestly, the context makes it even funnier. He poured everything into a gnarly, full-throttle bus brawl in a Marvel movie... and still lost Best Fight to two teenagers throwing down in a high school meltdown. Let me walk you through why both things can be true.

"I was nominated for an MTV Movie Award for best fight, which I lost to Sydney Sweeney."

The fight that put Simu Liu in the race

Liu was up for two MTV Movie & TV Awards for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Best Hero and Best Fight. That Best Fight nod was for the bus sequence early in the movie, where Shang-Chi takes on Razor Fist in a packed city bus and the whole thing turns into a sliding, sparking, seat-hopping war zone.

• What was nominated: Best Hero and Best Fight (for the bus scene) at the MTV Movie & TV Awards
• The matchup: Simu Liu vs Florian Munteanu as Razor Fist, in a bus so cramped they had to thread the needle on every move
• How they shot it: on an actual bus setup rather than green screen, which made the physicality and spatial limits very real
• How rough it got: Liu has talked about how the tight quarters made everything harder, and Munteanu has said the space was so unforgiving that both of them ended up in the hospital multiple times; the whole idea was to embrace the confined setting even if it meant taking some hits, and they absolutely busted their asses to make it work

Given all that, yeah, I get why Liu still brings it up. That bus fight is one of those sequences where you can feel the bruises through the screen.

So how did Maddy vs Cassie beat a Marvel bus beatdown?

Simple answer: emotion and timing. Sydney Sweeney and Alexa Demie won for their blowup in Euphoria during the school play in Season 2. It was messy, cathartic, and instantly memeable. The internet ran wild with it. Lines from that stretch were everywhere on TikTok and Instagram, and the fight turned into a cultural moment that people could quote, share, and joke about for weeks.

And remember, the MTV Movie & TV Awards are fan-voted. When a fight becomes a social-media supernova, it can steamroll right past meticulously choreographed set pieces. That is basically what happened here: the buzziest scene in the room edged out the most technically demanding one.

If you want to revisit both outcomes: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is streaming on Disney+, and Euphoria is on HBO in the U.S.