If you managed to escape the holiday season without seeing at least one clip of Timothée Chalamet pulling some stunt for Marty Supreme, congratulations, you live under a rock.
From sitting atop the Las Vegas Sphere screaming "Dream big!" to collabing with British rapper EsDeeKid, to every single one of his designer fits with "Marty Supreme" blasted across them, Timmy's been everywhere. Like literally everywhere.
He was even awarded "white boy of the year", which somehow feels both ironic and completely sincere.
But make no mistake: this isn't just another celebrity doing promo.
This is film marketing having a full-blown identity crisis and coming out the other side completely transformed.
According to Deadline, Marty Supreme achieved the fastest-selling presale for an A24 movie. It also saw the biggest per-theatre average for a limited release in 2025, grossing $875,000 from just six theatres in one weekend.
The film went on to pull in $27 million over the four-day Christmas frame, with half of polled moviegoers admitting they bought a ticket specifically because of Chalamet (no surprises there).
Yes, I’ll say it, despite being cliché, this is a masterclass in cultural omnipresence.
What we're actually sick of...
Honestly y’all, traditional press tours have become freaking unbearable. Not sure about you, but I’m DONE with actors cycling through the same anecdotes on fifteen different talk shows.
I’m exhausted by the forced "we're like a family" soundbites (only for it to be revealed that they despise each other, ehem, It Ends With Us saga.) I’m sick of the manufactured relationship rumours between cast members, the hand squeezing, a little too close for comfort shots.
I’m ESPECIALLY over the crying-in-interviews (looking at you, Wicked). It all feels so... calculated. So tired. And it all soooo needs to be left in 2025.
The Marty Supreme campaign threw that entire playbook in the bin and said, what if we just became the culture instead? And what if we’re like, totally nonchalant about it?
Instead of going to media, Chalamet and A24 created moments so bold and visually striking that media and people naturally wanted to cover them.
The Las Vegas Sphere was transformed into a giant orange ping pong ball, with Chalamet as the first person to ever stand atop it. We’re moving out of press junket to actual performance art here.
Then was the collaboration with EsDeeKid which hit the net like a tornado. A genuine cross-pollination with internet culture, leaning into conspiracy theories that they might be the same person and turning it into content.
And an honourable mention to the limited-edition Nahmias windbreakers, which retailed at $250 and are now fetching over $3,000 on StockX.
Even the meta-awareness of the campaign, like that 18-minute spoof Zoom call where Chalamet pitches painting the Statue of Liberty orange, gives people permission to enjoy the spectacle without feeling manipulated.
The "white boy of the year" discourse is both celebration and somewhat of a public knighting of Chalamet, with a subtle tinge of irony. The duality is what makes it work.
Why this lands in 2026
We all know by now that attention is more fragmented than ever. You can't just buy TV spots and hope people show up anymore.
You need to be everywhere, but in ways that feel native to each platform. Audiences are media-literate enough to see through traditional PR tactics. So you have to give them something real, or at least, something that feels real.
The line between high culture and internet culture has dissolved.
Designer fashion, art installations, rap collabs, memes - it's all the same ecosystem now. And people no longer care to receive marketing; they want to participate in it.
As one industry executive put it, "Timothée Chalamet is a generational talent both in his skills as an actor and in his understanding of the attention economy and social media landscape." In other words, the dude gets it.
We're not going back to the old way. The press tour as we knew it is dead, and Marty Supreme just gave it the most stylish funeral imaginable.
Welcome to the era of cultural omnipresence and guerrilla tactics, where the marketing is the culture, and Timmy just set the standard.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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