“Marty Supreme,” an A24 film, is described on the popular site Letterboxd as follows: “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” However, the true substance of the film is revealed only upon watching. It was directed by Josh Safdie, a co-director of the popular film “Uncut Gems,” and was inspired by films such as “A Place in the Sun,” “The Joker is Wild,” “Saturday Night Fever,” and “Risky Business.” Big name Timothee Chalamet plays the leading character, but was also directly involved in the success of the press tour and overall box office triumph that was the opening of Marty Supreme.
GOOD PRESS GOOD SALES
Marty Supreme earned $27 million over the four-day Christmas weekend. It was the second-largest debut for A24 in the U.S following the film “Civil War”. In the U.K, it became the highest-grossing release of all time as of Jan. 6, 2026. Chalamet is a marketing genius and was, in one woman’s opinion, responsible for the dual national praise of the U.S. and the U.K.
Chalamet’s press tour for the film included bizarre, unorthodox means of creating buzz. Between releasing a bright orange blimp to fly around the U.S. and opening up the general Instagram public to a pre-screening of the first thirty minutes, Chalamet’s innovation put the name “Marty Supreme” in lots of mouths. Amongst his tactics, Chalamet “leaked” production meeting footage filled with wild ideas for promotion, like painting the Statue of Liberty orange. It was stunts like this that distinguished this film’s pre-release press from movies like “Christy” or “Die My Love”, which did not perform nearly as well as “Marty Supreme.” When asked about his approach to marketing, Chalamet told Variety: “Movie marketing is trying to be passive; trying to be chic. We’re not trying to be chic.”
MARTY SUPREME AT BIOLA
The Marty Supreme fever has reached even the Cinema and Media Arts Department of Biola. Among the promising students in that department, a few viewpoints were particularly compelling. Ashton Pulis, a Cinema Media Arts Major and SAG member, was among some of the first people ever to see an early screening of Marty Supreme. His love for it was loud and proud, and a clip of him praising the movie was even used in official advertisements.
“I think that what draws me to this film is the sheer amount of confidence and gall that Marty Supreme has,” Pulis said. “I think the perfect word to use when describing it is ‘electrifying.’ It’s 2 hours and 30 minutes, but you don’t feel a second of the runtime. Josh Safdie’s style of filmmaking is so unique and frankly, addicting to watch. That style, paired with the cinematography of Darius Khondji, described by Safdie himself as a ‘Necromancer’ of light, and the brilliant electronic score by Daniel Lopatin, you get a film experience like no other.”
Seeing his passion for the film itself and the impact it left on him as an actor was what convinced me to see the movie. Joshua Labata, a Cinema and Media Arts alumnus, and JD Williams, a current CMA major, reflected on the convicting nature of Marty Supreme as well.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a movie that feels this relentlessly singular to a director’s vision. And maybe that’s why the exploitation of Marty’s ambition in this movie feels so intimate, exhausting, and beautiful,” Labata explained.
“I think the movie is incredible. Someone who does whatever they want to get whatever they want, and still wins in the end. It subverted my expectations at every point and made me think a lot about what it meant to be successful,” Williams shared.
It’s the Marty Supreme movie, not the Marty normal movie. Some humor there in reference to the wildly successful film that is “Marty Supreme,” a brilliant achievement for A24 and Timothee Chalamet as a younger actor. The film is still running in the majority of theatres around the U.S. and opens in IMAX starting Jan. 30. See for yourselves why this peculiar orange ball ping-pong movie has received such high praise from the U.K. to La Mirada.
