Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the boxing biopic Christy seemed like a sure-thing heavyweight contender: the kind of A-list indie passion project that typically makes cinematic splashdown during the Labor Day Venice-Telluride-Toronto festival corridor and sucks up more than its share of awards-season oxygen through the Oscars. Calibrated around a transformative performance by star-producer Sydney Sweeney — who dims her bombshell affect beneath a series of bad wigs, 30 pounds of added muscle, and a blood-and-guts glow-down to conjure pioneering Hall of Fame pugilist-toughwoman Christy Martin — the crowd-pleasing $15 million drama arrived at TIFF as one of the fest’s buzziest acquisition titles (i.e., one looking for domestic and international distribution deals). It was shot on a relative shoestring budget by acclaimed Australian filmmaker David Michôd, and it fits into a proud lineage of star vehicles for glamorous actresses uglying up in preparation for Academy Awards (see: Nicole Kidman’s The Hours, Charlize Theron’s Monster, Margot Robbie’s I, Tonya). Widely expected to also harness the public’s fascination with Sweeney — arguably her generation’s most semiotically potent celebrity, whose coquettish media manipulations made Anyone But You a sleeper smash — Christy seemed destined for both critical and commercial success.
Out of Toronto, the film’s production company and financier, Black Bear, announced it had effectively sold Christy to itself as the inaugural feature for the company’s newly established distribution arm. And Black Bear (behind such films as the Best Picture–nominated WWII biographical drama The Imitation Game and 2023’s acclaimed Annette Bening swimming biopic Nyad) picked a November 7 rollout in the heart of Oscars season on 2,011 screens across the U.S. and Canada. But over its opening weekend, Christy suffered a shocking first-round knockdown. The R-rated rise-fall-redemption drama (that also delves deep into the psychology of domestic-violence victimhood with Ben Foster portraying Martin’s husband-coach and attempted murderer) grossed $1.3 million in its first three days in theaters. That sum ignominiously places Christy among the top-ten all-time-worst debuts for a film on more than 2,000 screens.
Sweeney recently went on Instagram to explain she is still “deeply proud” of Christy — “why? because we don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact” — and indeed attended the obligatory Oscars precursor the Governors Awards on Sunday to campaign for it. But industry observers have continued to puzzle over both muted audience response to the film and Black Bear’s disastrous theatrical rollout (Christy shed over 1,100 screens in its second weekend of release, losing any chance of “legging out” paltry early returns to eventual profitability).
While the sports drama certainly fits into an alarming trend of recent artsy-fartsy movies featuring A-list celebrities sputtering and dying at the box office — Dwayne Johnson’s MMA bio-drama The Smashing Machine; the postpartum phantasmagoria Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson; the Channing Tatum sad-dad heist film Roofman; and Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell’s romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey among those playing to near-empty theaters — Sweeney’s inability to “open” Christy was hardly its greatest liability.
According to insiders with knowledge of Black Bear’s plans for the film, Christy ultimately fell victim to economic crosswinds that are buffeting the independent film world. And now executives at the company are trying to assign blame. “Rolling out a little movie — even with a big star — has become very hard,” says a Hollywood talent agent with longstanding ties to the indie film world. “You used to be able to do limited releases. This movie, the Rock movie, they should have come out on like four screens and then platformed into wide releases. Now they come out on thousands of screens and are fighting against big movies like Avatar. You can’t do that because you can’t hold the screens! That’s the death of the independent film business that no one is talking about.”
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In an interview with Deadline earlier this month, Black Bear’s owner and chief executive, Teddy Schwarzman, outlined what success for Christy would look like — thereby also providing a broad rationale for releasing the movie in over 2,000 theaters. “There’s a lot of talk about the underperformance of Smashing Machine, which we appreciated as a film,” Schwarzman said. “Christy was made for under $20 million, closer to $15 million. Our exposure, from a U.S. standpoint, is modest. That said, I think what we want to make sure is that people understand what an incredibly singular performance Sydney Sweeney provides. It’s transformation both physically and emotionally. Coming out of Toronto, she was immediately put into awards consideration. Audiences have really sparked to it.”
Key to that release strategy, of course, is a theater-chain ecosystem still decimated by the pandemic and 2023’s twin Hollywood strikes that continue to disrupt the movie supply chain. With multiplexes effectively starved for new product, a smaller movie like Christy — that before COVID would have built momentum through strong reviews and word-of-mouth buzz — was ushered straight into abnormally wide release. Just as crucially, it was evaluated by the same kind of wide-release money metrics as a Marvel Cinematic Universe entry or megabudget tentpole like Universal’s Wicked: For Good.
“Within this context, Black Bear saw an opportunity to hold more screens, and they took it,” says Daniel Loria, editorial director of Boxoffice Pro. “If you look at the rest of the year, they’re not going to find 2,000 screens in any other corner of the cabinet. There’s no space. Once Wicked comes out, forget it. No one is going to get within an inch of having an indie at that level. So should they have platformed? I’m not sure they would have had a shot at ever getting to that screen count.”
Black Bear spent $10 million marketing Christy: a relatively robust media spend in relation to the movie’s slender production budget. But that push was no match for moviedom’s financial doldrums. October delivered a series of resounding flops including Disney’s woebegotten Tron: Ares, the little-seen Boss biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, and the J.Lo musical adaptation Kiss of the Spider Woman to now stand as that month’s worst cumulative box-office haul since 1997.
“At face value, Christy doesn’t look like a 2,000-screen opening weekend film,” Loria says. “This film wasn’t built for that. But the market was there to take advantage of. Black Bear saw an opportunity. And the opportunity didn’t pan out.”
