Get your jock strap and smelling salts ready. ‘Tis the season for prestige filmmaking, and this year, boxing-themed dramas are the preferred genre. No occupation or sport is better designed for Oscar attention than the “sweet science.” This year, producers are counting on it, with at least five major boxing films releasing with huge stars in the cast. In The Cut, Orlando Bloom depicts a decrepit boxer making a comeback. Pierce Brosnan channels his inner Burgess Meredith, playing a grizzled boxing coach in a true-story adaptation called Giant. Sydney Sweeney and Dwayne Johnson both have highly anticipated biopics coming out soon, showcasing their acting chops. Earlier this year, Ving Rhames starred in his own boxing-themed drama, Uppercut.
This year’s abundance of boxing movies is more than a coincidence or a fad. As long as there’s been movies, there’s been underdog boxers and comeback stories. For those young readers, you might be asking why this formula is so popular. Based on their track record, these films are moderately successful at the box office, but they serve a purpose beyond financial gain. Why does every actor — and increasingly, actress — inevitably turn to the boxing picture? At the risk of sounding jaded, it comes down to award consideration. There’s no better shortcut to winning critics’ hearts than two dudes in their underwear in the middle of a ring giving each other brain damage.
How Boxing Became the Cinematic Main Event of 2025
When it comes to making your bones as a thespian nowadays, you have two or three solid routes. You play a disabled person, a historical figure, or a prize-fighter. It’s not all that shocking that actress Sydney Sweeney is playing against type, cast as a closeted lesbian boxer under the thumb of notorious promoter Don King. According to USA Today, she binged junk food to adequately play the part of the real-life ’90s-era brawler Christy Salters (then fighting under the name Martin), just at the moment she had become the sex symbol of her generation.
In the same vein, we see Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) tackling the Mark Kerr biopic, The Smashing Machine. Martial arts is not technically boxing, but close enough. After a decade attaching himself to projects beneath him, Johnson is finally challenging himself with the type of film he is uniquely suited for. Guess he heard our criticism.
Is It Really a Boxing Movie If the Actors Don’t Endanger Their Health?
As if the hype around the current It-girl and Dwayne Johnson wasn’t enough, there’s still more action on this fall’s movie undercard you probably missed. Lost amid the crowd is Orlando Bloom’s The Cut, directed by Sean Ellis. In the tradition of Robert De Niro’s masochistic attention to realism in Raging Bull, Bloom took the bodily transformation concept incredibly seriously. Ellis noted in an interview with our George Edelman that Bloom appeared “ill” as a result of “eating tuna and cucumber for three weeks” to get his body fat down to an impossibly low 3%, starving himself to nail the look.
Like Bloom, Pierce Brosnan is staging a kind of comeback with a radical physical reinvention, this time as the trainer of British fighter Naseem Hamed (played by Amir El-Masry). Instead of slimming down, Brosnan is going full Benjamin Button, covered in makeup and hunched over, to sell the illusion of a weathered, balding older man. Though funny enough, the Irishman finally can speak in his real accent, so at least he can focus on acting while he wears all those prosthetics and fake hair. Releasing quietly a few months ago, Ving Rhames also starred in his own boxing drama, Uppercut. Rhames returned to familiar territory, having previously played a fight-fixer in Pulp Fiction as the menacing kingpin Marsellus Wallace, an homage to the 1947 noir thriller The Set-Up. The tropes, like the sport itself, never go out of style.
New Contenders Seek the Title
Taking a short look at the Oscars and other international awards, you begin to see a clear pattern emerging. It’s a no-brainer. Boxing movies, more than any other niche, tend to be over-represented among Academy Award nominations, including: Rocky (which spawned the nominated sequel Creed), The Champ (both the 1931 original and 1979 remake), Million Dollar Baby, Ali, Body and Soul, Warrior, Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, The Fighter… you get the idea. That’s not including the films The Boxer and Requiem for a Heavyweight, which contained juicy roles that could easily have been nominated in relevant categories for their fictional boxers.
By their nature, boxing movies don’t need gimmicks, nor do they require CGI, witty dialogue, or even intricate plotting or backstory. No, Sylvester Stallone, we don’t need a sprawling Rocky origin story to see how Adrian landed her job at the pet store. Rather than suffering from a lack of backstory or complex themes or messages, sports films typically succeed specifically because they are so lean and focused. All an audience needs to get hooked on an athlete’s story is to root for a compelling character in an intriguing scenario, not even necessarily a “good guy.”
Jake LaMotta is a rare underdog anti-hero whom we come to pity rather than respect. Will The Smashing Machine and Christy do for Johnson and Sweeney what Raging Bull did for De Niro? Who knows, but Johnson and Sweeney’s agents are earning their pay by nudging them out of their comfort zones (and skin-tight denim) and into some spandex trunks. History has shown that for an actor, it’s a gamble worth the wager, if only for the method acting cred.
- Release Date
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October 3, 2025
- Runtime
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123 minutes
- Director
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Benny Safdie
- Writers
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Benny Safdie
- Producers
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Beau Flynn, David Koplan, Dwayne Johnson, Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia
