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\n Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: A24, Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n
On the latest cover<\/a> of Sports Illustrated, the boxing titan Christy Salters Martin leans against the perimeter of a prize ring, the American flag hanging behind her. It is a full-circle moment; in 1996, she became the first female boxer to be featured on the magazine\u2019s cover. Trailblazing wasn\u2019t easy \u2014 Salters Martin, a butch lesbian, endured rampant sexism, homophobia, and even attempted murder on her rise from small-town West Virginia to the International Boxing Hall of Fame. She now stands as an American hero. Posed in front of her on the SI cover is Sydney Sweeney<\/a>, the blonde bombshell who plays Salters Martin in the 2025 biopic Christy. She is notably styled so her cleavage pops.<\/p>\n In 2025, the Hollywood fight movie swung back into fashion. This feels appropriate for times defined by aggressive machismo, open cruelty, and nostalgia for a simpler past. Distortional algorithms and AI make it easy to idealize a man who makes a living with his two hands and the struggle against a single, concrete opponent. In addition to the aforementioned Christy, this year saw biopics of the Olympic boxer Claressa \u201cT-Rex\u201d Shields (The Fire Inside, technically released on Christmas Eve in 2024) and the mixed-martial-arts fighter Mark Kerr (The Smashing Machine) as well as fictional psychodramas orbiting in the ring (The Cut). There are several boxing movies in production, like Netflix\u2019s Fight for \u201984, in which an Olympic boxing coach (Jamie Foxx) must rebuild his entire team after a fatal plane crash.<\/p>\n These films work off a classic formula, perfected over a century. Boxing is not the most popular sport in America \u2014 that\u2019s football \u2014 but it\u2019s the most foundational to Hollywood. The world\u2019s first-ever feature film, released in 1897, was a 100-minute documentary of a match between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons. Since then, Hollywood has produced hundreds of boxing movies, including Rocky, Raging Bull, and Million Dollar Baby. A reliable narrative template has emerged: A working-class underdog enters the world of professional boxing. What he doesn\u2019t have in money, name recognition, or healthy relationships, he makes up for in raw talent and grit. There are setbacks, of course \u2014 cue the training montages of our hero sprinting across the city and pummeling a speed bag. Or a shot of him collapsed in the corner of the boxing ring, coach barking in his face, before he staggers forward to win his championship.<\/p>\n The familiarity is part of the charm. \u201cWe love boxing because it stays the same as the decades pass. We love boxing films for the same reason,\u201d the writer Benjamin Nugent proclaimed in a 2015 essay<\/a> about the sport\u2019s continual onscreen presence. But over the past century, professional boxing has transformed from scrappy underground prizefights into a multi billion-dollar commercial industry. It is now a lucrative attention scheme for belligerent influencers and washed-up celebrities: One of America\u2019s highest-grossing boxers is the Jake Paul, roguish YouTuber whose real talent is converting controversy into cash. Combat has become a billionaire hobby:\u00a0Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk notably agreed to a cage match in 2023 before the latter backed out, and Zuckerberg has appointed UFC president Dana White to the head of Meta\u2019s board. President Donald Trump is former boxing promoter. Next year, for America\u2019s 250th anniversary \u2014 and his 80th birthday \u2014 he is bringing UFC fighters to brawl on the White House South Lawn<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is the cultural backdrop for this year\u2019s fighting movies, which attempt to complicate the classic American boxing story. Some draw attention to the ways the sport damages its male superstars, both physically and psychologically. The Benny Safdie\u2013directed A24 biopic The Smashing Machine follows Mark Kerr (played by former WWE fighter Dwayne \u201cthe Rock\u201d Johnson) during his MMA ascent between 1997 and 2000. (At the time, American cable-news outlets refused to show UFC fights; U.S. fighters flocked to Japan.) On the surface, Kerr is a paragon of masculinity: a stoic Hulk who chugs protein shakes. But his physical strength masks an inner fragility \u2014 he is broken, sobbing in his hospital bed after a brutal match and numbing his pain with opioids. \u201cI just need you to treat me like a man,\u201d he sniffles, head hung after a blowup argument with his girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt), after ripping a door in half.<\/p>\n The Cut, directed by Sean Ellis, also trains its lens on a man in crisis. It follows a retired Irish boxer (played by Orlando Bloom<\/a> for some reason) staging a comeback. A YouTuber with half a billion followers accidentally killed a Vegas title-fight contender, giving our unnamed protagonist another shot at victory. There\u2019s a catch: To make the weight class, he must lose 26 pounds in six days. The movie\u2019s subject is actually his extreme weight-cutting regimen. He eats virtually nothing \u2014 two halves of a boiled egg with the yolks scooped out and a forkful of chicken \u2014 then binges a chocolate bar in a fit of weakness, rushing to the bathroom to vomit it back up.<\/p>\n In heavy-handed flashbacks, we see the boxer in The Cut as a defenseless young boy, picked on in school and raised by a single mother who has resorted to prostitution to pay the bills. \u201cBoxing is fundamentally about anger,\u201d the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a 1985 essay.<\/a> \u201cBecause, for the most part, [boxers] belong to the disenfranchised of our society, to impoverished ghetto neighborhoods in which anger is an appropriate response.\u201d The sport is a response to powerlessness under a political system whose all-encompassing cruelty we attempt to forget through individual discipline. In the end, the boxer makes weight \u2014 at the expense of his sanity, marriage, and even a limb. Even if you win, you still lose.<\/p>\n Claressa Shields would know. In 2012, Shields became the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing at the age of 17, but she returned home to no national sponsorships or endorsements. \u201cEverybody was just saying, you know, \u2018You should be signing with Nike. You should be on the Wheaties box. How come? Aren\u2019t you in this magazine?\u2019\u201d she told NPR. Shields grew up poor in Flint, Michigan; her father was incarcerated and her mother an alcoholic. But her athletic excellence apparently was not enough to compensate for the unpalatable image of a woman who actually likes to fight. \u201cYou seem like a bully,\u201d a condescendingly polite USA Boxing media representative tells a young Claressa (played by Ryan Destiny) in The Fire Inside.\u00a0\u201cI box \u2014 I am a bully. Floyd a bully, Ward a bully, even Ali was a bully,\u201d Shields protests. She\u2019s insulted by the meager offer of $1,000 per month to join the USA Boxing team; she can\u2019t afford to leave her struggling family. \u201cMoney is recognition,\u201d she growls.<\/p>\n Boxing is a barbaric sport, a gladiatorial blood battle in which human suffering is the point, not an accident. We may find it abstractly beautiful. But the reality is that boxers suffer traumatic brain injuries, broken limbs, and even death for what is usually meager pay. As independent contractors, they must patch together basic medical care and navigate financial interests that care more about views than lives. The only film that fully recognizes this is The Cut. But it also asks its talent to put his body on the line for ambiguous reward. To prepare for the movie, Bloom shed 52 pounds in three months, subsisting on tuna and cucumber. \u201cI sort of still have a bit of PTSD, to be honest, when I think about it and see the film,\u201d he confessed<\/a>.<\/p>\n Really, the ultimate prize for a star athlete is not a championship belt but a winning media narrative that one can repackage over and over for some semblance of financial security. It\u2019s telling that the majority of this year\u2019s Hollywood boxing movies are biopics. Their real-life subjects \u2014 Christy Salters Martin, Claressa Shields, and Mark Kerr \u2014 have already mined their life stories in documentaries and memoirs. Though these films question the American Dream at the center of boxing movies, they can\u2019t resist a triumphant conclusion, skipping forward to the present day, when all is okay. (Kerr even makes a cameo at the end of The Smashing Machine.) Details are pruned in service of obvious points, and the end product is boring to watch.<\/p>\n Despite the herculean effort powering them \u2014 the extreme physical transformations, hours sitting for press \u2014 this year\u2019s fight films bombed at the box office. The Cut appeared and went as if it never existed; I don\u2019t know anyone besides me who watched it. The Smashing Machine became the worst opening of the Rock\u2019s career, ultimately recouping only about a fifth of its $50 billion budget. Johnson had taken a hefty pay cut to star in it. Christy premiered to only $1.3 million in its first weekend, one of the worst openings of all time for its size. It was passed over for Golden Globes.<\/p>\n Christy was a shot at redemption for Sweeney, the embattled main character of the year. Growing up, she was determined to succeed. Her high school\u2019s valedictorian, she professes to have never partied. She\u2019d decided to pursue the long-shot dream of acting when she was 13. So her family gave up their home in small-town Washington for a motel in Los Angeles. Sweeney shared a bed with her mom. Their financial struggles put a strain on her parents\u2019 marriage, which rattled her. \u201cI thought that if I made enough money, I\u2019d be able to buy my parents\u2019 house back and that I\u2019d be able to put my parents back together,\u201d she said in a 2022 Hollywood Reporter interview.<\/a> \u201cBut when I turned 18, I only had $800 to my name.\u201d<\/p>\n Though she got a big break from HBO\u2019s Euphoria and then The White Lotus, Sweeney couldn\u2019t shake her financial anxiety. \u201cIf I just acted, I wouldn\u2019t be able to afford my life in L.A. I take deals because I have to,\u201d she revealed, justifying\u00a0the many advertising campaigns she\u2019s done. TV doesn\u2019t pay as much as it used to, she said, and a cut of her paycheck went to lawyers, accountants, and hairstylists; her publicist\u2019s fee costs more than her mortgage.<\/p>\n Sweeney has said that she begged director David Mich\u00f4d to work on Christy, working out twice a day and putting on 35 pounds for the role. \u201cThis is the most important film I\u2019ve ever made,\u201d she wrote in an Instagram caption sharing her Sports Illustrated cover. Its commercial failure is a shame because Christy was the best of the lot this year, partially because of the unbelievable nature of Salters Martin\u2019s story: She survived an attempted murder in 2010 after a heated argument with her manager-husband, Jim Martin, who stabbed and then shot her.\u00a0But Sweeney\u2019s solid performance in the movie \u2014 and Salters Martin\u2019s own harrowing life story \u2014 has been overshadowed by endless controversy. Sweeney is better known for her American Eagle denim ad<\/a> and the awkward GQ interview<\/a> during which she did not denounce white supremacy. She is hated and she is everywhere, dominating the news cycle in this dog-eat-dog society in which basic survival has never seemed more like a fight.<\/p>\n Stay in touch.<\/p>\n Get the Cut newsletter delivered daily<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n