Sydney Sweeney Had Two Box Office Bombs. Can Toronto Break the Curse? 

This year’s August dump of indie films that gathered dust for years hasn’t been kind to Sydney Sweeney, one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young actresses whose summer of discontent also includes a major backlash over an American Eagle Jeans campaign that even resulted in President Donald Trump giving her a shoutout for being a registered Republican.

Sweeney has been riding a wave of enviable success since 2019, from her breakthrough work in HBO’s Euphoria and a small part in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, to her Emmy-nominated role as the entitled daughter of a female tech mogul in the first season of Mike White’s The White Lotus.

Then there was Anyone But You, the Glen Powell two-hander that put studio rom-coms back on the map. It opened in theaters over the Christmas holidays in 2023 on its way to grossing north of $220 million, a sum that even caught Sony executives by surprise.

What no one realized was that Sweeney was supposed to have another film hit theaters that year — Americana, a modern-day Western in which she plays a waitress who gets caught up in a scheme to peddle stolen Native American artifacts, and whose troubled brother believes he’s the incarnation of Sitting Bull.

The obscure indie film, directed by Tony Tost, made its debut in at SXSW in spring of 2023, but couldn’t find a U.S. distributor until this year, when Lionsgate Premiere picked up U.S. rights. The film opened to a mere $500,000 from roughly 1,100 theaters over the Aug. 15-17 weekend, one of the worst showings of all time for a title going out in that many cineplexes. The film’s cast also includes Paul Walter Hauser and Halsey. Insiders claim that Americana did just fine for Lionsgate Premiere, which banks more on home entertainment than theatrical, but even Tost acknowledged that the opening was a disappointment, when he wrote on X Aug. 21 that the film “gobbled up by the zeitgeist.” 

The heaping on didn’t end there for Sweeney. A week later, Ron Howard’s indie film Eden opened in theaters to a forgettable $1 million from 664 theaters nearly a year after the period survival thriller premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival to middling reviews. Like Americana, buyers passed on picking up Eden despite its veteran director and A-list ensemble cast led by Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana de Armas, Daneil Brühl and Sweeney. Eden, which has a 57 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is based on the true story of a tiny group of European settlers who escape to the Galápagos Island following World War I.

Those close to the actress say she is being unfairly maligned over the box office results, considering both were ensembles pics, and especially Eden. They also say Sweeney harbors no regrets for the choices she and her team have made. The Paradigm-repped actress has been laying low, however, but won’t be able to for much longer.

She’s preparing to return to TIFF for the Sept. 5 world premiere of David Michod’s biographical sports drama Christy. The film follows the real-life story of queer former professional boxer Christy Martin, nicknamed “The Caol Miner’s Daughter.” Sources speculate that Sweeney’s performance in the Black Bear Pictures film could land her a spot in the awards race. The movie is a big swing for the star, who gained some 30 pounds for the role and was coached by Martin.

And Sweeney will be in theaters on Christmas Day with Lionsgate’s high-profile The Housemaid, a psychological thriller filmmaker Paul Feig that also stars Amanda Seyfried. The year-end holidays can be one of the most lucrative corridors of the year in terms of being able to support multiple movies in the marketplace if a title clicks with its target audience. Lionsgate (and likely Sweeney) is hoping that The Housemaid will clean up at the box office based on the 2022 book’s popularity and the movie’s two stars. It will also give younger females a chance to see something other than Avatar: Fire and Ash, which also opens over the year-end holidays. Given that the movie solely rests on her, rather than an ensemble, it will be a key test.

One source close to Christy says Sweeney remains a big star with enormous brand recognition, and that two small indie films tanking hasn’t hurt her career. “She is not damaged,” this person says. “But outside of doing press in Toronto, she probably needs to stay quiet for a bit.”