Masters of heat
In Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet is the living embodiment of chutzpah. He is cocky, charming, manipulative, tenacious and irresistibly charismatic. Those same qualities define the film’s marketing campaign – arguably the most audacious movie launch since Barbie in 2023.
With Academy Award winners like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Moonlight; hit TV series such as Euphoria (HBO) and Beef (Netflix); and critic favourites including The Zone of Interest and Aftersun, A24 is revered among film lovers as a temple of cool. In a recent New Yorker essay titled Empire of Auteurs, Alex Barasch argues that A24’s real disruption isn’t merely aesthetic, but structural. A24 has built a studio model designed to attract the most distinctive voices in cinema. It puts creative authority back in the hands of filmmakers and supports them in delivering their vision. This is a sharp break from the traditional studio logic of development-by-committee and four-quadrant optimisation (films formatted to offend no one). A24 backs directors with strong, idiosyncratic visions and largely stays out of their way. Conviction, not confection.
But crucially, while creative control is decentralised on the production side, it is centralised on the marketing and distribution side – where A24 applies just as much ambition, authorship, and nerve.
A24 cannot outspend the major studios’ marketing departments. Instead, it treats promotion as a creative act. Over time, the company has become a master at engineering cultural heat through bold, authored ideas that feel like entertainment in their own right. Recent examples include partnering with The Satanic Temple to host screenings of The Witch; creating a live “ranking” of New York men that mirrored Materialists’ transactional view of romance; and turning googly eyes into a ubiquitous cultural symbol for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
These campaigns are designed to earn attention. What unites them is that they make the marketing feel like the film itself. Where traditional movie campaigns rely on a cookie-cutter formula (trailers as synopsis, interviews as validation, review quotes as reassurance), A24 goes further. Its campaigns embody a clear point of view (the film’s), extend rather than merely reflect the world of the film, and invite audiences to become co-authors and amplifiers of the heat.
The campaign for Marty Supreme is the clearest recent expression of this philosophy. Like the film, it is playful, self-aware and giddily unhinged. Its organising idea is also Marty’s mantra: “dream big”.
The campaign began with a staged Zoom call posted to Chalamet’s own social channels. In the 18-minute video, he pitches increasingly absurd and grandiose promotional ideas to A24’s marketing team. The tone is dry and knowing. It satirises corporate culture, movie-star ego, and marketing itself.
Once the tone was set, the rest followed naturally. The “ridiculous” ideas floated in the Zoom call began materialising in the real world: an orange blimp drifting across the sky; the Empire State Building lit in orange; Chalamet standing atop Vegas’ Sphere; merch designed as social signalling. The most distilled expression of the campaign, and of Marty himself, might be a single image: a photograph of a pair of giant (ping-pong) balls.
The obvious question is: why does A24 remain such an outlier? Why does an industry that defines the cultural zeitgeist, and is so directly affected by shifts in media, distribution and audience behaviour, continue to operate with a marketing playbook written for the monoculture era?
Most entertainment marketing borrows heat from the property it’s meant to promote (talent, IP, soundtrack) rather than generating any of its own. Marketing is merely announcement. It rarely enters the conversation, let alone shapes it.
A24’s approach is precisely calibrated to today’s media environment.
• First, it is content before it is advertising. Entertainment that happens to sell a film, rather than advertising that pretends to entertain.
• Second, it is “liquid and linked,” to borrow Coca-Cola’s phrase: designed to travel organically across platforms, but always anchored to a clear idea, point of view and distinctive assets. The stunts are not random; they compound.
• Third, it makes audiences co-creators and amplifiers of the heat. A24’s campaigns invite speculation, decoding, remixing and debate. They turn passive awareness into active meaning-making.
• Fourth – and most importantly – talent wants this. By giving creators and stars genuine authorship within the campaign, A24 transforms promotion from a contractual obligation into a form of self-expression. Chalamet didn’t just promote Marty Supreme; he raised his own cultural currency through it.
In a context of fragmented attention and diminishing returns on paid media, A24 consistently generates disproportionate earned reach per dollar spent. Heat compounds. Once created, it travels further, lasts longer, and carries more credibility than bought awareness ever could.
The lesson isn’t that every film needs a blimp, a stunt or a viral moment. It’s that marketing must earn its place in culture. A24 treats marketing as a second act of authorship – an opportunity to extend a film’s worldview or philosophy and turn it into a game or conversation with the audience. This approach demands the same standards of creativity as filmmaking itself.