Why Sydney Sweeney’s Christy Flopped As Hard As It Did

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 distr