Timothée Chalamet Is Taking the Marty Supreme Press Tour to New Heights…Literally
Marty Supreme is already outpacing A24’s projections for the Timothy Chalamet movie. A high profile piece of promotion this week saw the current Internet favorite standing atop the Las Vegas Sphere telling fans to go see Marty Supreme in theaters. (The video zooms out to reveal the Sphere is projecting an orange ping pong ball with the movie’s title on it.)
Multiple folks on the Internet have been praising the rollout for Marty Supreme, And with good reason. Chalamet has been busting his butt on the marketing trail. But, there’s a very clear reason why this movie has the Internet in a chokehold: He’s mastered a streetwear playbook.
Earlier in the week, Chalamet hopped on EsDeeKid’s remix to “4 Raws,” a drill-style banger from the U.K. mystery man that kind of gave the game away for me. Sure, Marty Supreme Is a A24 Pedigree film from a Safdie brother. However, The movie star is also using the techniques he grew up seeing from Black culture, namely streetwear to make a ping pong film into a pop culture moment. Instead of a slew of brand pop ups and sponsored posts, your feed is probably full of people getting orange ping pong balls out of small vending machines in theaters lucky enough to have the film.
Not for nothing, it worked for Deadpool & Wolverine’s claw machines. So, run that sucker up again. But, there are also some other telltale signs of how this deployment of a street wear esthetic is the real engine powering the entire Marty Supreme run.
Let’s talk about those Marty Supreme jackets
Without a doubt, the biggest piece of merch to come out of Marty Supreme So far has been these orange windbreakers with the movie’s title across the back. The last five years have seen a massive resurgence in 2000s era street wear staples like windbreakers, low top trainers, flat sole shoes, transparent electronics, and more. The different hues of the Marty Supreme jackets dominate social media for a solid week. For good measure, there are also film fans camping out for a chance to get the jacket in drawings. That only adds to the hype
If you’ve been around the block a couple of times with different street wear releases, then you immediately identify the classic Supreme or Nike SB releases of yesteryear as thematic parallels. Shock drops of limited edition products confined to a few small boutiques instead of large retailers like a foot locker or a finish line, engineered to drive hype in the nascent Internet economy of the 2000s.
For most young sneaker heads of the era, images from Jeff Staples’ pigeon Nike Dunk release back in 2005 solidified sneakers as their new obsession. News footage of mob-like scenes in New York City clued in a general audience to the exclusivity of sneakers and the fandom around streetwear that rapidly gained prominence over the rest of the decade.
The gift and curse of this era in Internet pop culture is that most people have short memories, and access to all kinds of archival footage. Viewers who weren’t around in the mid 2000s are getting their street wear fix from a ping pong movie set decades ago. It’s anachronistic, and maybe that’s the point!
Timmy Chalamet goes global
I’m sure the movie is just fine, most releases are now. Their success largely depends on a bunch of small factors that are hard to predict, and even more difficult to master. For Marty Supreme , the movie has a secret ace up its sleeve with Chalamet in the lead role. Ask someone closer to Gen Z, he will hit the pavement and pursue all kinds of alternative promotional styles that older actors might Askew. For example, I saw a clip of him sitting with Druski on one of the comedians multiple different social media shows singing Kirk Franklin.
If that’s not an indicator that we’re drawing off of Black culture writ large, I don’t know what is. (s/o to @mommabiia on Twitter joking about Chalamet moving like a Dem trying to get the “Black vote.”) It’s also worth noting that Taylor McNeill, you know the one hand-in-hand with “GNX-era Kendirck” is styling Chalamet right now.
On top of the world
Not mad at it, just noting how interesting it is that this movie has garnered the type of buzz it has when a lot of these studios are shying away from diversity and inclusion. Chasing that Gen Z dollar means that you could throw a lot of these playbooks out of the window. But when you’re drawing from something almost 20 years ago, all bets are off!
To be honest, it seems like it’s working for Timothy Chalamet in this strange little ping pong journey he’s on. Marty Supreme has managed to snare $875,000 from just six theaters in its first weekend out. Who knows if any of that will hit towards scale, but it has to be encouraging for the studio pushing the boat out on such a unique project. Still, it is darkly hilarious that the success of this movie is so tied to a culture that larger forces would like to see snuffed out before it has the chance to return serve.
(featured image: A24)
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