How Marty Supreme Became a Moment
The cultural playbook behind the rollout
For a film I’ve heard so much about, I can barely tell you what Marty Supreme is actually about.
Timothée Chalamet, ping pong, and New York(?) is all I could tell you.
I haven’t even seen a trailer. Especially when you compare it to One Battle After Another, a film you couldn’t avoid seeing a promo for.
And that’s the point.
What Marty Supreme has arguably done better than any film this century is become culturally relevant through unexpected, culture-hijacking marketing. Not through clarity and traditional movie marketing, but through tapping into youth culture.
The rollout has been on point, start to finish. And there’s a lot here I can learn from A24 for my job, so I’m breaking it down.
A tagline.
Dream big. It’s a sports movie after all, but Dream Big is something that Weiden + Kennedy would have given Nike during their historic brand marketing run.
18-minute “leaked” Zoom call.
Timothée talking through wild, half-baked ideas with the A24 marketing team. Some good, some bad, all out loud. Slightly unhinged, like ‘drenching the Eiffel Tower in orange to show international cooperation’, very intentional. Real Shia LaBeouf energy. It felt raw, uncomfortable, and most importantly, shareable.
Then the Wheaties box cover becomes real!
Which A24 then sold online.
Then the track jackets.
Funny timing. I wrote about track jackets having a moment nearly a month before Marty Supreme surfaced. Since then, it’s gone nuclear. Celebrities everywhere are wearing this jacket. And the official account is treating it like a merch drop.
The jackets are now reselling on StockX for around $6,000. Pure supply and demand, straight from the golden era of streetwear and sneaker hype playbook.
Then there’s the colour.
Orange.
Like Barbie in 2023, they’ve owned the colour pink. He speaks about this in the zoom call and owning the colour Burnt Orange. He says that his visual artist spent 6 months working on this colour. So now when you see that shade of orange online, you think Marty Supreme. It even mirrors the New York Knicks colour palette. For a proud New York movie, that visual crossover makes sense, intentional or not.
Speaking of the Knicks.
Marty Supreme branding appeared directly on the court during the Christmas Day game at Madison Square Garden. I half expected Timothée to be courtside in character. Not sure that happened, but the placement alone did the work.
The blimp.
Simple. Strange. Impossible to ignore. Designed to be photographed and shared.
Again, this was pitched in the Zoom call, which the team has concerns over. Something his visual artist worked on for 6 months.
Which he said should be a feature in Tyler The Creators’s headline set at his festival.
Pop Ups.
Ping pong pop-ups followed across major cities, pulling in influencers and creators who did the distribution for them. Organic reach, disguised as participation.
And then the Sphere.
Not just a takeover, but taking it one step further. Timothée standing what appears to be just high up but then as the camera zooms out, we realise he’s standing on the f***king Las Vegas Sphere. The first time this been done..
Oh yeah.. and he dropped a feature on a UK hiphop track. There has been a conspiracy that the rapper with a ‘Scouse accent actually is Timothee due to Esdeekid always hiding his face, only revealing his eyes, which look a lot like Timothee’s. If it’s Timee or not, the fact that he features as himself will get people talking.
Not marketing, but worth noting. He’s apparently been secretly playing ping pong for six years. Flying tables around the world so he could practice between filming other movies. Commitment matters when you’re selling obsession. And any good sports movie is automatically ruined the moment the audience realise they aren’t actually very good (except for White Men Can’t Jump and ignoring the way Wesley Snipes dribbles the ball. You can tell he’s rubbish).
As short-form content continues to dominate how we consume content, slightly ironic as I write this, it raises a real question.
Is this the new way to win awards?
Not just by making a great film, but by becoming unavoidable in culture.
There’s no doubt about it.
Marty Supreme isn’t just a movie.
It’s a moment.
As always, thanks for reading.
Hayden