The Champ

The Champ centres on Billy, a former boxing champion who now scrapes by training racehorses and drinking too much, raising his young son T.J. on his own after his wife Annie left years earlier. When Annie reappears, having built a new and comfortable life, she wants the boy back, and the custody fight that follows pushes Billy toward the ring again in an attempt to prove himself and keep his son.

Franco Zeffirelli directed the film, which came between Romeo and Juliet and Endless Love in the sequence of his features. Walter Newman wrote the screenplay and Dyson Lovell produced. Jon Voight plays Billy, Faye Dunaway is Annie, and Ricky Schroder plays T.J., with Jack Warden, Arthur Hill and Strother Martin in supporting roles. The film runs 121 minutes and was released in July 1979.

The commercial results were solid without being exceptional: a worldwide box office of about 30 million dollars. Audiences have generally been more favourable than critics. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.8 from roughly 9,900 votes, and on TMDB it scores 7 out of 10 from 217 votes, while the critics' rating stands at 5.2 from 25 reviews.