A year later: what happened to Naz and Brendan’s film Giant?
Prince Naz was a global superstar at the height of his boxing career
Naseem Hamed conquered the boxing world from his Sheffield base, winning world titles in Britain and America and becoming one of the most recognisable British fighters in history.
More than two decades after his retirement, the figures published for Giant, the film about his life and his relationship with trainer Brendan Ingle, appear to tell a rather different story: on the big screen, Hamed's appeal has been overwhelmingly at home.
Giant, written and directed by Rowan Athale, premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2025 before opening in UK cinemas.
Amir El-Masry plays Hamed, with Pierce Brosnan as Ingle, and the film follows the boxer from his childhood in Sheffield through his rise to world champion and the eventual breakdown of his relationship with his Wincobank mentor.
The film has subsequently been released in several countries, including the United States, but Britain accounts for almost all of the theatrical revenue currently reported by the main public box-office databases.
Box Office Mojo, a widely used database of cinema revenues, records a UK gross of $1,363,207 and a reported worldwide total of $1,450,869.
On those figures, the UK represents about 94 per cent of the reported worldwide total.
The Numbers, another box-office database, records a slightly different UK figure of $1,359,363 and an international total of $1,363,232.
Although the databases do not agree precisely, both show Britain as by far the largest reported market.
The overseas figures listed by Box Office Mojo are modest beside the British total. It records $41,106 from Russia/CIS, $36,461 from the United Arab Emirates, $6,226 from South Africa and $3,869 from Portugal. It also lists the United States as a release territory, but currently shows no US box-office gross.
The absence of a US gross in Box Office Mojo does not mean that nobody watched the film on the othr side of the pond.
Giant was released there on May 22 as a limited theatrical release through Vertical Entertainment, with the film also becoming available digitally on the same date, according to Rotten Tomatoes and The Numbers.
The available figures therefore cannot tell us how many Americans saw it, either in cinemas or at home.
What they can show is where the publicly reported cinema revenue was generated. On the figures currently available, Britain supplied by far the largest share.
That is an intriguing contrast with Hamed's career.
His victories made him an international star and he fought several times in the United States, including his 1997 world-title defence against Kevin Kelley at Madison Square Garden in New York. The film's US theatrical release, by comparison, was a limited one.
The reaction to the film itself has been mixed.
Rotten Tomatoes currently records reviews from 23 professional critics. Thirteen judged the film positively and 10 negatively, giving it an overall critics' rating of 57 per cent.
The same website gives the film a 64 per cent rating from more than 50 members of the public.
Hamed's own response has also been more complicated than a simple endorsement.
The 52-year-old was moved by the film's depiction of his relationship with Ingle, particularly an imagined reconciliation between the two men which never happened before Ingle's death in 2018.
He told BBC Sport that he wished the final scene could have been real.
But Hamed has also made clear that the film is a dramatisation rather than a complete account of his life and has criticised aspects of its accuracy and its portrayal of the breakdown with Ingle.
That distinction matters in a film about a real person who was not involved in making it.
Giant has now moved from cinemas into home entertainment. The Numbers records its video release on May 22, while JustWatch currently lists it for British viewers on Amazon Prime Video and for rental or purchase through several digital services.
So the theatrical figures appear to tell a fairly clear story, even if they cannot tell us the complete size of the film's audience: Giant travelled internationally, but its reported cinema business was overwhelmingly British.
And if its American cinema showing has fallen short of the impact Hamed himself once made in the United States, he at least has the consolation of having conquered that particular market long before his story reached the screen.