An Underrated 2024 Boxing Drama Is A Prime Video Hit After Flopping At The Box Office

Sometimes, even brilliant films end up flying under the radar, despite promising critical reception on release. The reasons can be multifold: poor marketing/release strategies, insufficient word-of-mouth, or good old bad luck. Streaming services like Prime Video can often spotlight such underrated gems, such as Jon S. Baird's dark comedy, "Filth, which recently became a hit on the streaming platform 12 years after its theatrical release. The same can be said about Rachel Morrison's feature debut "The Fire Inside," which is currently sitting at #5 on Prime Video's weekly Top 10 list (via FlixPatrol).

In case you haven't heard of this 2024 boxing drama, you can blame the film's long, troubled production, along with the fact that Amazon MGM Studios failed to create hype around such a promising story before release. Having premiered at last year's Toronto Film Festival to glowing reviews, "The Fire Inside" was theatrically released in December 2024, but ended up being a box office bomb. The fact that the film's release coincided with box office heavy-hitters like "Wicked" and "Moana 2" certainly didn't help matters, partly leading to this seemingly unassuming film being completely overshadowed.

While the film's 93% critic score on the Tomatometer speaks for itself, "The Fire Inside" is finally getting all the love it deserves, thanks to its recent Prime Video debut. In order to understand why this is a story worth experiencing, we need to understand its lengthy development/production history, along with why it is such a compelling genre standout.

Long before Morrison was attached to the project, Universal Pictures had approached Barry Jenkins to direct a film based on the 2015 documentary "T-Rex," which revolves around professional boxer Claressa Shields. Although Jenkins remained attached to the film project, Morrison was brought on board in 2019, followed closely by the leads being cast. Ryan Destiny was to embody Shields, while Ice Cube and Judy Greer were cast in prominent roles — while Greer doesn't appear in the film due to undisclosed reasons, Cube left during the COVID-19 pandemic after refusing to get vaccinated. You can imagine what happened next: long, inevitable delays due to the pandemic and Cube's sudden exit, which eventually led to Universal offloading the project.

After MGM picked it up in 2022, Brian Tyree Henry joined the cast (replacing Cube), and everything was (comparatively) smooth sailing from then on. The warm reception that "The Fire Inside" received during its Toronto debut was more than well-deserved, especially considering the long, halted production nightmare it had to endure to morph into the dazzling finished piece of art that it is.

In "The Fire Inside," Claressa Shields is hell-bent on boxing, despite what the jeering, misogynistic boys in her neighborhood taunt her with every day. She's desperate to escape her troubled home life, convincing boxing coach Jason (Henry) to let her into his boys-only training club. Now I know what you might be thinking: don't all sports success stories start off in this predictable format, where an underdog emerges victorious after beating impossible odds? While this may be true, "The Fire Inside" is anything but a clichéd genre exercise, as it is smart and perceptive enough to root for a story that is both sincere and sensational. Jenkins' script is the real star of this sleek, dynamic drama, which makes the best out of two versatile, charismatic leads who completely disappear into their respective roles.

In most sports-centered stories, the final destination is victory. However, "The Fire Inside" challenges this notion, as Claressa's fame doesn't sit well with sponsors in pursuit of profit, who still uphold patriarchal notions surrounding women's boxing. How deeply does such injustice sting, and how does Claressa deal with these impossible expectations thrust upon her? These answers are both moving and uncomfortable, and "The Fire Inside" doesn't shy away from etching a journey that puts more than someone's dreams at stake.