Sydney Sweeney’s promotion for Christy, a boxing drama about iconic boxer Christy Martin, was disastrous.
Martin, a gay woman who entered into an abusive marriage with her male coach, was the most well-known woman boxer of the 90s. Sweeney went through a dramatic physical transformation to play Martin, ditching her blonde locks and packing on pounds of muscle. It’s a film about perseverance, a woman coming into her own despite subjugation and degradation, literally clawing back from the brink of death to determine her own fate.
During the lead up to the film’s nationwide theatrical release on November 7, Sweeney did not promote herself as an actor who would star in a movie about women’s empowerment. Instead, she became increasingly popular with America’s right wing.
Don’t Miss
In recent an interview with GQ, Sweeney was entirely unapologetic about her American Eagle denim ad. It was widely perceived to contain eugenicist language. The whole good jeans, good genes play on words, delivered by a thin white blond woman with blue eyes, in a political climate where we actually do have to worry about the return of 1930’s thinking seemed at the very least, out of touch, if not outright sinister.
Not only was she glib about the public rebuke of the ad, she also had nothing to say when she was questioned by the GQ interviewer about President Donald Trump posting on Truth Social in support of her. Sweeney believes that this approach will work for her.
“You’ve made a really good case for keeping your thoughts and your life separate from that work,” the GQ interviewer said. “But the risk is that, there’s a chance that somebody will get some idea about what you think about certain issues, and feel like, ‘I don’t wanna see Christy because of that.’ Do you worry about that?”
“No. No” Sweeney answered. “If somebody is closed off because of something they read online to a powerful story like Christy, then I hope that, I hope something else can open their eyes to being open to art and being open to learning.”
It was bad calculus on Sweeney’s part.
Christy opened in more than 2,000 theaters across the country, and netted just $1.3 million dollars on its opening weekend. According to Variety, it was one of the worst opening weekends for a movie of all time. It comes out to about $649 in ticket sales, per theater. If the average price of a movie ticket is $11.31, that shakes out to about 114,943 people going to watch Christy in theaters.
For comparison, more than 537,000 people watched the Sydney Sweeney GQ interview, just on Youtube. Despite her bid to “let the work speak for itself,” Sweeney can’t do that. It’s not the world we live in; it’s not how Hollywood works. As Jon Stewart put it in his Monday night monologue about the box office bomb: “Apparently her new MAGA fan base didn’t show up in droves to see a biopic about a lesbian professional boxer who overcomes domestic violence to live her truth. Who could have seen that coming.”
Things got so bad that journalists and content creators started to share emails from Sweeney’s PR team asking for headline changes and corrections in stories that covered the movie negatively. This sparked fury from actor Rubi Rose, who was originally slated to star in the film.
“For her PR to talk about it flopping and saying SS did it for the ‘people.’ None of ‘the people’ want to see someone who hates them, parading around pretending to be us,” Rose wrote in a posted on Threads. “You’re a cretin and you ruined the film. Period. Christy deserved better.”
Sweeney herself said that she was incredibly “proud” of the movie, even after it’s dismal box office performance.
“We don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact,” Sweeney wrote on Instagram. “And Christy has been the most impactful project of my life. Thank you Christy.”
It will likely be impactful for far fewer viewers, who won’t be able to look past Sweeney’s public image bloody nose to watch her get a real one on the silver screen.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: feeds.feedburner.com
