There was a time when a press tour meant interview chairs and late-night sofas. In 2025, however, this approach feels dated. If your TikTok ‘for you’ page is anything like mine, your feed has been flooded with Soho pop-ups, limited-edition jackets, and an orange blimp hovering above Camp Flog Gnaw, all in the name of Timothée Chalamet’s promotional run for Marty Supreme. The film, centred around a 1950s table-tennis prodigy, almost feels like an afterthought compared to the wave of new content surrounding Chalamet’s new role.

Audiences now view conventional press tours and interviews as flat and formulaic, offering little insight into the creative process behind a film beyond polished anecdotes. Marty Supreme’s marketing rejects this dated style, foregrounding personality over product to create a publicly-lived narrative moment. Modern audiences are surrounded by advertising in every moment of daily life and have thus become far more selective about what deserves their attention and money. Hence, media marketing itself has to feel meaningful or emotionally engaging in order for viewers to experience something alongside actors, rather than be passively told about a finished film.

“Chalamet is a pioneer of this form of personality-driven marketing”

Chalamet is a pioneer of this form of personality-driven marketing, using each new film as the beginning of a new ‘era’ each with a distinct visual language and online identity. This strategy has caused greater parasocial audience investment into each of his roles. For instance, Chalamet constructs a persona around his role as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown by method-dressing in archival outfits and leaning into an eccentric, hyper-referential media presence. During the Wonka press cycle, Chalamet adopted a more theatrical image, leaning into the whimsy and fun of musical numbers, adopting playful styling, and foregrounding childlike charm across interviews and public appearances. In both cases, the promotional strategy transformed press into performance, and as an opportunity to publicly reinvent himself, crafting a new version of ‘Timothée Chalamet’ for audiences to follow. Marty Supreme is no different.

The film draws directly on the legacy of its titular character, based on the life of Marty Reisman, a flamboyant, self-made table-tennis prodigy in 1950s New York. It traces his unlikely ascent, presenting a man who earned fame through charisma and bravado as much as technical skill. At its core, Marty Supreme is a story about ambition and charismatic self-invention. This emphasis on showmanship is mirrored almost immediately in the film’s press campaign. The first piece of promotional material was a deliberately bizarre ping-pong livestream, where over 40,000 viewers watched Chalamet wear a ping-pong helmet before revealing a shaved head. This initial livestream was followed by a surprise premiere at the New York Film Festival, alongside a flood of early reactions calling it the Oscar vehicle Chalamet has been waiting for. Together, these choices signal a wider career pivot. Marty Supreme marks Chalamet’s movement away from indie credibility toward prestige-driven, legacy-building stardom. In playing Reisman, he aligns himself with a figure whose mythology is rooted in ambition and confidence, qualities the marketing actively amplifies.

“Marty Supreme marks Chalamet’s movement away from indie credibility toward prestige-driven, legacy-building stardom”

The Marty Supreme jacket crucially turns these aspirational values into a commodity. Designed by Taylor Macneil (who previously designed Kendrick Lamar’s Canadian tuxedo for the Super Bowl), the jacket has become the campaign’s leading image. Celebrities from Frank Ocean, Kid Cudi, and Kylie Jenner to Tom Brady, Bill Nye, and Michael Phelps have been photographed wearing it. Chalamet reposted each one with the same “Dream Big” scrawl, leading to the Soho pop-up selling out within 15 minutes. While the jacket offers little direct explanation of the film itself, ownership signals belief in a celebrity-inflected, pseudo–American Dream of ‘making it big’. The appeal lies in its exclusivity: access is limited, endorsement is elite, and participation is tied to visibility and consumption. In this sense, the campaign reflects a broader capitalist logic, where ambition becomes aestheticised and purchasable, and cultural belonging is mediated through fashion.

Contemporary audiences no longer respond to a celebrity simply appearing in a film; recent high-budget ensemble projects such as Black Bag and Argylle demonstrate that an impressive cast alone is no longer enough to guarantee engagement. Instead, they are drawn to films that position themselves at the centre of a cultural moment they feel compelled to inhabit. A limited-edition jacket that functions like a Supreme drop activates attention far more quickly than a conventional trailer. It meets audiences where culture already circulates within fashion feeds and online hype economies.

In this context, the appeal lies not in explanation but in participation. The performative logic of ‘being early’ encourages audiences to engage, repost, and buy in, revealing how effectively the Marty Supreme campaign understands digital spectatorship as something driven by spectacle, scarcity, and emotional investment rather than narrative information.

Straying from traditional marketing isn’t a new concept and has been an on-going trend for the 2020s. Namely, the 2025 Barbie campaign was able to captivate audiences due to their understanding of digital culture. They used aesthetics to create a moment linked to deeper themes of nostalgia and girlhood, turning marketing into world-building and allowing audiences to inhabit a film before its narrative is explained. Marty Supreme extends this approach, linking comic spectacle and absurdity to a single thematic value: ambition and ‘dreaming big’.

Rather than persuading audiences to care about ping-pong, the campaign positions them as witnesses to its excess, sincerity, and intensity, inviting participation through fashion, humour, and meme culture. Viewers watch the era unfold and feel as though they arrived early enough to see it happen. This shift has wider implications for the industry, signalling that big-budget films are increasingly expected to generate immersive cultural events. Film culture becomes more participatory and emotional, but also more dependent on spectacle, consumerism, and celebrity myth-making, reshaping how modern audiences relate to cinema itself.