In a weekend in which “Predator: Badlands” was far and away the top movie in America, bringing in $40 million domestic (when it was projected for just over half that), the bigger box office conversation on social media this weekend centered around a film that didn’t even crack the domestic Top 10.
That movie was the Sydney Sweeney boxing biopic “Christy,” which debuted to just $1.3 million. That is a bad number in most ways you might want to spin it, but there was one narrative that really took hold that’s easy to fight back. On Sunday, Twitter user Jonathan observed that it’s one of the worst openings for a movie that debuted on over 2,000 screens ever. To find that stat, you’ll need to scroll to the bottom of the All Time Records tab on Box Office Mojo and look at this chart, and you’ll see “Christy” ranks No. 12.
The assertion went viral, bolstered by the ongoing controversy about the recent American Eagle ad featuring Sweeney’s “Great Jeans.” What’s more, Sweeney has had two other movies that fizzle at the box office this year: the Lionsgate crime movie “Americana” and Ron Howard’s “Eden,” in which she’s part of an ensemble and not the main star. It’s a big shift after Sweeney bolstered the surprise box office of films like “Anyone but You” and “Immaculate.”
Black Bear, which is a brand-new distributor that made “Christy” its very first release, both financed and distributed “Christy” and is doing so for a responsible budget of $15 million. It will take a hit, but the distributor also sold the international rights to “Christy,” which can help to mitigate the box office losses.
But saying “Christy” had one of the worst openings ever based on the number of screens it played on is a weird, cherry-picked stat. Even if you were to switch tabs on that very chart and look at movies that opened on over 2,500 or 3,000 screens, you’ll see some other films, even some from this year, that opened in a similar ballpark as “Christy” and had worse per-screen-averages. And it’s nowhere to be found among the top titles if you filter to over 600 theaters, which Box Office Mojo still labels as “Wide.”
“It definitely does feel cherry-picked. What release date are we talking about? What’s the competition?,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst at Comscore. “For films like this or ‘The Smashing Machine,’ they’re not going for box office, they’re going for artistic freedom and are character-driven films that are not trying to be blockbusters.”
Dergarabedian explains there are a litany of other factors that could’ve played into why “Christy” didn’t connect. Did the average moviegoer think Sweeney was unrecognizable when they saw the trailer? Do casual audiences even know who the film’s subject Christy Martin is? Could a movie like “Predator: Badlands” have sucked up all the oxygen for other new releases? Would it have performed better opening in the spring? Even a movie like “Die My Love,” starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, was another starry, adult drama that only made $2.8 million from virtually as many screens. It’s hard out there for drearier movies for grown-ups.
You could make the case that “Christy” shouldn’t have opened on near as many screens as it did and instead went with a platform release in order to slowly build buzz. Dergarabedian points out that had “Christy” done just that, it wouldn’t be the first movie that died on the vine before it even had a chance to go wide. Distributors often grab additional screens because they can and because there’s a willingness from exhibitors to play them, which was the case here. The cost of a digital print is minimal compared to a film print. And if you’re a brand-new distributor like Black Bear, why not take a little added risk?
Sweeney too isn’t taking the disappointment to heart and, in a post on Instagram on Monday, said there are some more important things than box office.
“Thank you to everyone who saw, felt, and believed and will believe in this story for years to come. If ‘Christy’ gave even one woman the courage to take her first step toward safety, then we will have succeeded,” she wrote. “So yes, I am proud. Why? Because we don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact,” Sweeney said. “And ‘Christy’ has been the most impactful project of my life.”