Timothée Chalamet’s unhinged Marty Supreme promo tour is fun - but what really sells a film in 2025?

On 15 November, without prior announcement, one of the defining comedies of the year was posted to Timothée Chalamet ’s Instagram account. Captioned only “video93884728.mp4”, the 18-minute video at first appeared to be a leaked Zoom call in which the Oscar-nominated actor pitched marketing ideas for the movie Marty Supreme to bemused staff at the indie production house A24. It might take a few minutes, and at least one shock interjection of “schwap!” from the very serious-seeming star, to realize that it’s a joke. Well, sort of - the meta video, in which an egomaniacal Chalamet proposes they “highlight international cooperation” by painting both the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower a “very specific shade orange”, satirizes the tedium of movie marketing desperate to get people in seats, while also introducing a harebrained marketing strategy that’s unabashedly thirsty to get people in seats. Timothée Chalamet at the New York premiere of Marty Supreme.Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images The “leak” heralded an unconventional and extremely committed press campaign for Josh Safdie ’s 50s-set ping-pong epic that has turned movie marketing - so often formulaic, cloying or apathetic - into eye-catching performance art. “Movie marketing is trying to be passive, trying to be chic,” Chalamet says in the video, for which he wrote the script. “We’re not trying to be chic.” Not chic, perhaps, but certainly entertaining. In the weeks since Chalamet pitched “fruitionizing” Marty Supreme via big orange blimp (the “vehicle representation of American greatness”), the actor and studio have been somehow both unpredictable and everywhere . Among the highlights: staged pop-up screenings with Chalamet flanked by bodyguards sporting giant orange ping-pong balls for heads; a near-wordless Instagram live that introduced the refrain “Marty Supreme Christmas Day” to the masses; an ad campaign in which the so-called Goats (Greatest of All Time) of various fields, from Tom Brady to Bill Nye to Misty Copeland, wear a branded windbreaker - “the defining garment of 2025”, according to GQ - for an ad campaign that exhorted people to “dream big”; a mock talent competition with Chalamet and the ping-pong bodyguards as judge; and, of course, a bright orange blimp above LA, with journalists on board . (As of this writing, the Statue of Liberty remains green, but A24 did get the Sphere in Las Vegas to that very specific rust shade.) The hype for an unreleased, original ping-pong movie was sky high even before Chalamet memorably debunked rumors that he’s moonlighting as an underground rapper named EsDeeKid , when he appeared in a music video for a remix of the masked Liverpudlian’s hit 4 Raws. It all makes for easily the most idiosyncratic, unhinged and genuinely enjoyable press run in a year when the movie press run often seemed like it had run out of road. And it appears to be working - in limited release in New York and Los Angeles ahead of the holidays, Marty Supreme scored the biggest per theater average opening for a film since 2016, a promising start...

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