I can’t remember the precise moment, but somewhere between Marty Supreme’s ecstatic surprise premiere at the New York Film Festival and the point where A24 sent a bright orange blimp to float over Los Angeles, I formed the thought, Oh, they actually want this to make money. The solo directing debut of Josh Safdie, Marty, which stars Timothée Chalamet as an abrasive hustler who becomes convinced his most direct route to fame and fortune runs through the world of professional ping-pong, is very much in the mold of the movies Josh made with his brother, Benny, especially Heaven Knows What, Good Time, and Uncut Gems, all stories of low-life strivers counting down the moments until disaster catches up with them. But, though it has the scuzzy, scuffed-up look of the Safdies’ low-budget landmarks, Marty’s period setting and epic scope—the story takes Marty to, among other places, Japan, Egypt, and the Balkans—required a reported budget of at least $60 million (some estimates go as high as $90 million), which is $10 million more than Uncut Gems, by far the brothers’ biggest box-office success, grossed in its entire theatrical run.
Of course, Marty Supreme has a not-so-secret weapon in its leading man, who may be the biggest, and certainly the most enthusiastic, movie star of his generation. Few people relish public attention as unabashedly as Chalamet does, or seem as deft at navigating its pitfalls without major missteps. His Best Actor nomination for last year’s A Complete Unknown made him the youngest man to score a second nom since James Dean in 1957, but Chalamet is as extroverted as Dean was withdrawn. Whether he’s rapping on Saturday Night Live or laying down college-football commentary like a seasoned pro, he blossoms in the spotlight rather than shrinking from it. He makes being a movie star look fun.
Marty Supreme, which Safdie co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein, is a downbeat fable about the dark side of the American dream, run through with the understanding that there are few paths to financial success and public approbation for a young Jewish man from the tenements of New York in the 1950s. But it’s also, for all the seedy locales stuffed into its 2½ hours, a bit of a romp, buoyed by the repugnant charisma of Chalamet’s performance, as well as a star-studded supporting cast that includes Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’Zion, and Tyler Okonma, aka Tyler, the Creator. Marty is a genuine talent, good enough to, early in the movie, get himself all the way to the finals of the table tennis world championship. But he only gets to the championship by stealing money from his uncle and abandoning the married girlfriend he’s gotten pregnant, the latter dramatized by an opening-credits sequence in which we see Marty’s sperm valiantly swimming their way toward her ovum, until one, by dint of sheer determination, finally reaches its goal.
Chalamet has put no less effort into promoting the movie’s release. At an early screening last Thursday, he said he had 128 appearances scheduled in the next 96 hours, and while we’re unlikely to get a thorough fact-check on those figures, it’s certainly felt like he’s been everywhere, dominating new media and old. The result of the film’s early release, limited to just six screens in New York and Los Angeles, was an impressive $875,000 opening weekend—the highest take per screen of any movie in 2025, and the highest for any platform release since 2016’s La La Land.
The latter stat underlines some of the pitfalls involved. A big swing by a well-liked indie director with two irresistible young leads, Damien Chazelle’s movie was a career-making hit, but it also became a victim of its own success, so instantly ubiquitous that people were proclaiming they were sick of it before it had even reached its peak audience. The same thing threatens Marty Supreme. Chalamet is a proven box-office draw—his last three leading roles, in A Complete Unknown, Wonka, and Dune: Part Two, have grossed a combined $1.5 billion worldwide—but with no preexisting IP or built-in fan base, Marty rests on his shoulders more squarely than any of its predecessors, especially since cutting through the cultural noise and getting audiences to see a movie in theaters grows exponentially more difficult with every passing year. Chalamet has to be everywhere, all the time, but in a way where each appearance feels like a pleasant surprise rather than the latest stop on a promotional death march.
Thus: the Zoom. Six weeks before Marty Supreme’s release, A24’s social media channels surfaced what purported to be an unedited video conference between Chalamet and the indie distributor’s marketing department. Over the course of 18 excruciating minutes, Chalamet, his scrawny arms protruding from an incandescent yellow tank top, unveils his plans for selling the movie to a captive audience of increasingly uneasy branding specialists. At one point, he sets them up for what he seems to feel is a stunning reveal, then unveils a tiny square of solid orange, hastily magnifying it on his shared desktop when it fails to get the desired response. Then he suggests painting the Statue of Liberty the same color.
Chalamet’s tongue-in-cheek brain wave is a riff on a scene where Marty pitches a friend’s father on the idea of investing in bright orange ping-pong balls branded with his name, despite the fact that he’s at best a moderately well-known figure in a largely obscure sport. He’s not the kind of person you build a campaign for a new product around, any more than Marty Supreme is the kind of movie you hire a blimp to promote. But the movie’s campaign brilliantly harnesses the ramshackle largesse of its protagonist, with stunts, like driving a truck full of orange ping-pong balls around Manhattan, that feel both overblown and undercooked.
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Marty’s campaign has also fostered more conventional means of hype building, like releasing a $250 branded track jacket available only at pop-up stores. And, since Chalamet is campaigning for an Oscar as well as an opening weekend, some of his appearances have taken a less ironically self-aggrandizing turn. He told one interviewer that Marty Mauser was the latest in a string of “top-of-the-line performances” and said that neither he nor audiences should take his prodigious talent for granted: “This is some top-level shit.” One of the Zoom sketch’s best gags is when Chalamet shares his laptop screen and reveals that his desktop image is a photo of himself onstage at the Screen Actors Guild awards, accepting Best Actor with a well-received speech in which he proclaimed his desire to be “one of the greats.” But it’s clear that desire is sincere—and that Chalamet, though he holds back from saying it outright, thinks he already belongs in that pantheon.
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A Variety article called the movie’s press tour “divisive,” and the “top-level shit” interview—which had started to inspire online grumblings about arrogance—was taken off of the internet, a sign that, even though Chalamet’s boasts are, as he told one journalist, “in the spirit of Marty,” that spirit doesn’t always translate outside the context of the film. It’s one thing coming from a scrappy youngster struggling against the prejudice of the 1950s, and another from the Oscar-nominated millionaire who’s dating Kylie Jenner. Of course, Chalamet isn’t the only star who thinks of himself so highly, but an unspoken rule of Hollywood is that you’re supposed to leave touting your accomplishments to others, not act like you’re overdue for the industry’s highest honor at the age of 29. Chalamet is great in Marty Supreme, but his greatest performance might be as a gifted, hard-grinding young actor whose ambition is tempered by humility—at least, when he remembers that’s the role that he’s supposed to be playing.
