Over the four-day Christmas movies-release window, blockbusterdom’s reigning titles claimed the top two spots at the box office: James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ice soared to a cumulative $760 million worldwide in its second week of release, delivering big for its studio distributor, Disney, along with Zootopia 2 ($1.4 billion in week five). But the Timothée Chalamet ping-pong dramedy Marty Supreme served up an ace for A24 at No. 3. Across its first weekend in 2,600 North American cinemas, the R-rated star vehicle took in $17.5 million to rank as A24’s second-biggest three-day debut to date. (Alex Garland’s disaster-fantasy Civil War retains the title, with $25.7 million over its first three days in April 2024.)
Buoyed by a raft of glowing reviews, Marty is already being handicapped as an Oscars front-runner in major categories including Best Picture and Best Director for A24 stalwart Josh Safdie. The movie also bolsters Chalamet’s track record of yuletide movie excellence. Little Women (the Greta Gerwig–directed 2019 literary adaptation that features Chalamet in a supporting role), Wonka (his 2023 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prequel, which grossed a robust $634.5 million globally), and the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (for which Chalamet received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination) all reached theaters around Christmastime: Hollywood’s prime, ticket-selling real estate for releasing both awards bait and mainstream crowd-pleasers. “Timothée hasn’t missed,” says David A. Gross, who writes the influential movie-industry newsletter FranchiseRE. “He’s working with great directors. He’s making interesting creative choices. He’s working across a variety of genres. He’s connecting with different audiences. He’s not a generational talent yet, but he could grow into it.”
Thanks to the relative dearth of broadly commercial wide releases hitting multiplexes in January, the 30-year-old New Yorker actor’s comedic-dramatic table tennis odyssey — which features a constellation of interesting cameos — is expected to play strongly into the new year. But any discussion of Marty Supreme’s box-office supremacy must begin and end with Chalamet’s tireless, shape-shifting promotional blitz for the film, which cost a reported $70 million to produce, making it A24’s most expensive title to date.
Chalamet striding through Times Square flanked by orange-ping-pong-ball-helmeted storm troopers. Chalamet hooting and hollering atop the Las Vegas Sphere as the Alan Parsons Project’s “Sirius” plays in the background and the venue’s LED exoskeleton glows orange with Marty Supreme branding. Chalamet trolling the rumors that he is secretly the U.K. rapper EsDeeKid by recording the song “4 RAWS (Remix)” with EsDeeKid and appearing in a video alongside the mysterious masked MC to spit such memorable bars as “My dick is young and restless / When they say I’m too senseless / I respond like, ‘Bitch, you guessed it.’” Chalamet in a performatively cringey 18-minute Zoom marketing meeting during which the star/Marty co-producer brainstorms increasingly insane ways to generate pre-release awareness for the film including painting international landmarks like the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower orange. Chalamet always, always kept conversation focused around the movie — mostly while attired in the slinky, Nahmias-designed Marty Supreme windbreaker that is currently being worn by A$AP Rocky, Susan Boyle, Kendall Jenner, Ringo Star, and Tom Brady.
2025 proved that appearances by A-list celebrities on the standard promotional circuit are no longer enough to guarantee even middling box-office returns for new movies. Watching Glen Powell grimace and choke his way through a Hot Ones interview or Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson undergo a Vanity Fair lie-detector test seems to satiate the public curiosity surrounding them, making respective viewings of The Running Man and Die My Love unnecessary. Chalamet seems to have plotted a different route. “He just has a way of thinking about culture,” Safdie marveled of Chalamet’s consistent promo virality in GQ. “He just is so in touch with the fabric of life, I can just watch him do it.”
In an auspicious measure of audience interest and long-term playability, Marty Supreme grossed $875,000 on just six screens over its limited-release debut on the weekend before Christmas — taking in a per-screen average of $145,933, which is the highest ever for an A24 title. The film went on to gross $10.8 million domestically on its opening day: another A24 record. It also managed to snap the awards-season celebrity-sports-movie cold streak established by Dwayne Johnson’s The Smashing Machine (which cost somewhere between $40 million and $50 million to film but has only taken in $21 million to date) and Sydney Sweeney’s Christy (an anemic $1.9 million in torn tickets). Marty’s B+ Cinemascore has somewhat punctured the ping-pong ball, however. While not downright horrible, that audience-exit polling indicates a certain polarization — specifically around the film’s sentimental ending and Marty’s world-beating, all-encompassing self-absorption.
“That Cinemascore reflects how some people think the movie is too intense — it’s not the gee-whiz comedy/underdog ping-pong story they thought they’d be getting,” says Scott Mendelson, the box-office columnist for Puck News who also provides Hollywood analysis on The Outside Scoop. “It got great reviews and is certainly a mainstream, fun, ‘must-see-this-in-theaters’ kind of title. But you’re also going to have some people be like, ‘That little shithead doesn’t deserve this kind of last-minute redemption’ or whatever. The Cinemascore ratings for horror movies get pulled out the same way, where you have some people who feel a film is too scary and uncomfortable while others who think it’s not scary enough.”
According to Mendelson, Marty Supreme punches way above its box-office weight as a non-IP, non-franchise film from an indie distributor competing against Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters in one of the year’s most competitive release corridors. And its merits as a possible Oscar contender aside, the movie places Chalamet within a continuum of top-tier leading men — Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men and Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness also rank on this list — who can draw in audiences on the strength of their screen presence rather than because they are appearing in name-brand projects. Adds Mendelson, “Chalamet is the closest thing we have to a butts-in-seats, old-school movie star.”
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