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Marty Supreme rules the world. Josh Safdie’s ping-pong drama has officially made over $100 million world-wide, becoming the fourth A24 film to reach that milestone. It follows fellow 2025 release Materialists, the divisive 2024 thriller Civil War, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2022 gonzo multiversal tale that won best picture.
Clearly, no one can dispute Marty Supreme‘s success. But the success of protagonist Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, remains in question. The movie ends on an ambiguous note, leaving fans to continue to debate its meaning. In this age of superhero blockbusters and Disney live-action remakes, such complexity seems like box office poison. But audience’s embrace of Marty Supreme proves that viewers want something more than easy-to-understand good guys and bad guys.
Like Safdie’s previous collaborations with brother Benny, Marty Supreme follows a mess of the protagonist’s own making, as arrogant and reckless ping-pong phenom Mauser shamelessly seeks a rematch against Japanese champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), exploiting anyone who has the misfortune to enter his orbit. Chalamet gives a virtuoso performance, at once charismatic and repellent, inviting viewers to hold him in contempt as much as they watch him with awe.
Safdie, who co-wrote the script with Ronald Bronstein, matches Chalamet’s layered performance with his filmmaking. The movie follows the beats of a traditional underdog sports story, its spectacle heightened by incredibly-shot table-tennis matches and a powerful synth score by Daniel Lopatin. Yet, it doesn’t shy away from Mauser’s despicable behavior, nor from unpleasant moments, such as a subplot involving a low-level hood (Abel Ferrara, director of NY scuzz classics such as Driller Killer) and an injured dog.
At no point does Marty Supreme tell the viewer how to feel about the character or the events, which seems like the kiss of death at the box office. In a year when Zootopia 2 and Avatar: Fire and Ash topped the box office, both films that end with heroes saving the day and obvious bad guys given their just rewards, Marty Supreme seems like the sort of thing that would garner a following among the same weirdos who love Ari Aster and Oz Perkins flicks and be ignored by everything else. But Marty Supreme‘s returns show that there’s a desire for messy works with no clear moral message.
The same could be said of A24’s other $100 million dollar grossing movie. While Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s ecstatic message of contentment and empathy resonated with many moviegoers, it also sparked a backlash in which film fans dismissed it as glib and cloying. Worse charges were hurled at Civil War, which came under fire for refusing to map its characters onto our current political climate, and at Materialists, who some found as either too kind or or too critical of its doomed romantics. Yet, these varied controversies did not keep moviegoers from seeking the films out.
As these numbers show, audiences certainly want spectacle with clean narratives and simple morality. But they can also handle some nastiness and ambiguity along with their popcorn fare.
Marty Supreme is now playing in theaters worldwide.
The post Marty Supreme’s Box Office Success Proves that Audiences Want Complex Films appeared first on Den of Geek.
