Sydney Sweeney and the business of being hot

Yahoo

2 days ago

Sydney Sweeney is a Hollywood supernova, making a dizzying amount of moves professionally, yet social media is consumed with the superficial. She's using it to her advantage.
Look no further than the announcement that the Anyone but You star's brand partnership with men's bath product Dr. Squatch will now include a limited edition line of soap bars infused with her bathwater. Sweeney said the idea was born from 'dirty little boys' who 'wouldn't stop asking' for it after she first partnered with the company last year for a sultry campaign shot in a bubble bathtub.
She's not exaggerating: A comment from the original Instagram ad from October 2024 asking, 'how much for the water,' has nearly 40,000 likes. Dr. Squatch called Sweeney 'a legend' for agreeing to create the bathwater soap, which the brand says smells like 'morning wood.'
Sweeney's either a genius or desperate, according to social media. While we won't make that call, we'll observe that there is such digital discourse around her — her beauty, her body and especially her love life. So who could blame the actress, who's been praised as 'business-minded' and 'ambitious' by her Anyone but You costar Glen Powell for orchestrating their fauxmance to market their hit rom-com, for taking it to the bank?
Sweeney is a studio moneymaker. The films she acted in, as of press time, have earned $244,399,399 worldwide, according to the Numbers. She's also a storytelling mover and shaker through her production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, which she cofounded in 2020 with her producing partner and former fiancé Jonathan Davino. The films she's produced have made $243,952,681 worldwide. Yet her love life drives much of the conversation around her.
Sweeney initially chose not to even confirm her broken engagement with Davino, after she stopped wearing her engagement ring in February, and yet that consumed the Q1 gossip cycle. She told the Times of London in a May 31 story that she is single and "learning a lot about myself."
The bigger story has become who she'll date next. Social media went cray-cray when, after her Davino split, she attended Powell's sister's wedding. Had the costars coupled up? Apparently no. But the idea that this smoldering movie scene could be reality just wound up the masses.
There was yet another fervor when Sweeney was close-talking with her costar in The Housemaid, Brandon Sklenar, at Stagecoach in April. Just talking to her former Downfalls High costar Machine Gun Kelly and White Lotus actor Patrick Schwarzenegger at a Las Vegas party in May led to a 'flirty threesome' headline — among other suggestive gossip. She can't even stand next to a man without a flurry of innuendo.
Social media isn't just obsessed with Sweeney's love life; there's plenty more trivial chatter to go around. Almost as soon as she broke through in Hollywood, discourse about her looks and body began. In December, trolls posted cruel comments after she muscled up to play boxer Christy Martin.
It's not just the random keyboard warriors having their say. Veteran film producer Carol Baum said that Sweeney is 'not pretty' and 'can't act' and called Anyone but You 'unwatchable.' In response, Sweeney called Hollywood's 'women empowering other women' movement a facade. She also let her style make a statement, mock apologizing for having 'great tits.'
Why are people so shallow when it comes to Sweeney? Turns out, it's an age-old formula of stardom plus gender.
'When the concept of Hollywood stardom first emerged in the 1910s, much of the original discourse focused on actors as picture personalities, which meant that fan culture focused on the various onscreen roles actors had played,' Claire Sisco King, Vanderbilt University's associate professor and chair of Cinema and Media Arts, tells Yahoo Entertainment. 'Pretty quickly, however, this discourse began to focus as much on the private lives of stars as it did on their work,' as fan magazine coverage began to extend to the love lives of stars in the 1920s.
Now, 100 years later, that coverage has not only persisted but also intensified due to the rise of reality TV coupled with the boom of social media, which has 'created heightened audience expectations of access to and intimacy with famous people,' King says.
There is a more critical lens on females than males, 'which is in keeping with traditional gender norms in our culture,' King says. 'While it has been historically acceptable for men to have professional lives and to be associated with the public sphere, U.S. culture still tends to expect that women be tied to concepts of home, family and love. Discourse about Hollywood often insists that women be attached to men in adherence with these traditional gender norms.'
It's common for internet culture 'to fixate on the romantic lives of famous women,' King says, 'and the treatment of Sydney Sweeney is in keeping with these patterns. Such emphasis especially applies to women who are constructed as 'bombshells' because so much of their persona becomes attached to their perceived attractiveness and appeal as objects of desire for heterosexual men.'
When it comes to Sweeney being connected to her romantic leads, that's also typical because it 'helps to preserve the fantasy that audiences enjoy when they watch fictional love stories that feel as if they could be real.'
Sweeney wisely leaned in on that fantasy with Anyone but You when she and Powell pretended there could be something going on to help market the movie. That was part of the film's success.
But female actresses walk a fine line. Anytime women take roles that are outside the box we see them in, people view it 'as a kind of betrayal,' says King. For Sweeney, 'An example of this inverse perspective [is] when many fans — especially men — expressed dislike at the change in her appearance while shooting the Martin biopic.'
While the social media noise blasts, Sweeney is methodically plotting her career — and building up her bank account.
Just a handful of film projects she has slated are starring roles: the Martin biopic, a screen adaptation of the video game Split Fiction, the psychological thriller The Housemaid and a long-awaited Barbarella remake. As she did with Anyone but You, she will again double-dip and produce all four.
Sweeney has talked about being hands-on when it comes to producing projects, saying she kept Sony's marketing team 'awake at night because I couldn't stop with ideas' around Anyone but You. She said she was on every call and in text group chats.
With the confidence of a seasoned Hollywood player, Sweeney said she accepts roles — like in 2024's disappointing-and-she-knew-it Madame Web — as a 'building block' in getting her own projects made. 'Everything in my career I do not just for that story, but strategic business decisions,' she said. 'Because I did that, I was able to sell Anyone but You [and] get Barbarella.'
Sweeney's business sense extends to money management. She's called herself a 'huge saver,' explaining, 'I don't just go and spend money. I like to invest. I like real estate. I like making, hopefully, smart choices with the money I'm making.'
There's a personal reason behind that: Sweeney's parents went through bankruptcy when she was young. Despite her stardom, she worries about how much money she has going in and out.
She's said that if she didn't take brand partnerships — like Dr. Squatch but also beauty (Laneige) and fashion brands (Miu Miu) — on the side, she couldn't pay her bills.
Sweeney's business acumen has been praised by not just her costars but also by executives and collaborators. Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group head Tom Rothman called her a 'force of nature' and said the studio is lucky to be in business with her. Jessica Goodman, whose YA novel They Wish They Were Us is being adapted into a series by Sweeney, called her 'very savvy' with an ability 'to get things done in a way that might surprise people.'
Jennifer Millar, Sweeney's talent agent for over a decade, has said, 'From the beginning she knew what she wanted. She knew how she was going to get there, and she's been doing it.'
Sweeney is, after all, the same girl who, at 12, made a PowerPoint presentation to convince her parents to allow her to pursue acting. Her pitch worked and has paid off.
It's paying off again as she turns leering comments into a money-making brand campaign for soap, which has resulted in her very own product. And people are lapping it up.