Timothée Chalamet in a straw hat, sweating through a ping-pong hustle in 1950s New York, is the image A24 wants in your head for Christmas 2025. The film is Marty Supreme, the first feature Josh Safdie has directed without his brother Benny since 2008, and it has been building a reputation as one of the year’s loudest awards-season swings since the first trailer landed. Here is what is confirmed about the release date, the cast, the real table tennis legend behind the story and where you can watch it.
Key Takeaways
- Release date: Marty Supreme opens in US theaters on December 25, 2025, through A24.
- Director and writers: Josh Safdie directs from a script he wrote with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein.
- Lead: Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a table tennis hustler loosely inspired by real-life champion Marty Reisman. Chalamet also produces.
- Supporting cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Kevin O’Leary, Tyler, the Creator, Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara, Penn Jillette and Sandra Bernhard.
- Setting: New York City in the early 1950s, with the sport’s global shift from hardbat to sponge paddles in the background.
- Where to watch: Theaters only at launch. A24’s recent titles have streamed on HBO Max after their theatrical and digital windows.
When Does ‘Marty Supreme’ Come Out?
A24 has set Marty Supreme for Christmas Day, December 25, 2025, in US theaters. That date is not an accident. Uncut Gems went wide on Christmas Day in 2019 and became the biggest domestic hit A24 had ever released at that point, so the studio is clearly hoping lightning strikes the same tree twice.
The holiday corridor also puts the film directly in the awards conversation. Chalamet’s A Complete Unknown opened on the same date in 2024 and carried him to his second Best Actor nomination. A Christmas launch means strong word of mouth can roll into January guild voting and February’s Oscars, which is exactly the path A24 walked with films like The Brutalist last year.
If you want to see it with a crowd on opening day, plan ahead. Christmas is one of the busiest moviegoing days of the year in New York, and the Brooklyn screens at Alamo Drafthouse and Nitehawk tend to sell out for anything with Chalamet’s name on it. Expect a wide release rather than a slow platform rollout, since A24 has been treating this as a mainstream play from the start.
Who Is in the ‘Marty Supreme’ Cast?
The ensemble mixes movie stars, musicians, a reality TV shark and a few faces you would expect to find at a downtown repertory screening rather than in a studio release. That blend is very Safdie. Good Time put Robert Pattinson next to non-professional actors from Queens, and Uncut Gems paired Adam Sandler with Kevin Garnett and The Weeknd. Marty Supreme leans even harder into stunt casting that somehow feels right.
| Actor | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Timothée Chalamet | Marty Mauser | Lead and producer; character inspired by Marty Reisman |
| Gwyneth Paltrow | Kay Stone | Her first major film role since Avengers: Endgame (2019) |
| Odessa A’zion | Rachel | Marty’s love interest; known for Hellraiser (2022) and Fresh Kills (2023) |
| Kevin O’Leary | Milton Rockwell | Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful” in his first dramatic film role |
| Tyler, the Creator | Wally | Grammy-winning musician, in a supporting part as one of Marty’s friends |
| Fran Drescher | Marty’s mother | The Nanny star, in a rare dramatic film turn |
| Abel Ferrara | Supporting role | The Bad Lieutenant director in front of the camera |
| Penn Jillette | Supporting role | Half of Penn & Teller |
| Sandra Bernhard | Supporting role | Comedian and The King of Comedy co-star |
Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser
Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a kid from the Lower East Side who believes table tennis will make him rich and famous even though almost nobody in America cares about the sport. The trailer sells him as a fast-talking hustler with a chip on his shoulder, closer to Sandler’s Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems than to any clean-cut sports hero.
This is also a producing credit for Chalamet, which matters. He has spent the past few years choosing projects with a clear strategy: Dune for scale, Wonka for mass appeal, A Complete Unknown for prestige. Marty Supreme is the “cool New York auteur” entry, the kind of film that signals he wants to be in the same conversation as the actors who worked with Scorsese and Cassavetes in their twenties. Reports before the shoot had him spending months training in table tennis so the rallies could be shot without obvious doubles.
Gwyneth Paltrow as Kay Stone
Paltrow’s casting was the first real headline this project generated. She has been open for years about stepping back from acting to run Goop, and her last screen work of note was the Avengers franchise. Here she plays Kay Stone, a glamorous older woman who becomes entangled with Marty. The trailer frames her as part temptation, part benefactor, with the Hollywood-star polish that Paltrow has not been asked to use on screen since the early 2000s.
It is a smart piece of casting beyond the nostalgia. Paltrow won her Oscar for Shakespeare in Love in 1998 and spent the decade before that playing women who were sharper than the men around them in films like The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Royal Tenenbaums. Safdie putting her opposite a 29-year-old Chalamet in a story about ambition and transactional relationships is the kind of move that gets written about on its own.
Odessa A’zion as Rachel
A’zion has been one of the more interesting young actors working in independent film, with lead roles in the 2022 Hellraiser reboot and Jennifer Esposito’s Staten Island crime drama Fresh Kills. She plays Rachel, the woman in Marty’s life who has to put up with his schemes. If you have seen her in Fresh Kills, you know she can carry an outer-borough accent and a scene full of shouting men without disappearing.
Kevin O’Leary as Milton Rockwell
Yes, that Kevin O’Leary. The Shark Tank investor plays Milton Rockwell, a wealthy businessman who crosses paths with Marty. Casting a man famous for telling entrepreneurs they are “dead to me” as a 1950s power broker is either a gag or a stroke of genius, and the trailer suggests it might be both. The Safdies have a long history of pulling real-world figures into their films and getting surprisingly textured performances out of them. Kevin Garnett essentially played himself in Uncut Gems and ended up in the best scene in the movie.
Tyler, the Creator and the rest of the ensemble
Tyler, the Creator plays Wally, one of Marty’s running buddies, in his most substantial acting role to date. Fran Drescher plays Marty’s mother, which gives the film an authentic New York Jewish mother in a story that is partly about a Jewish kid from the tenements trying to muscle into a world that does not want him. Abel Ferrara, Penn Jillette and Sandra Bernhard round out a supporting cast that reads like the guest list at a downtown party in 1985.
What Is ‘Marty Supreme’ About?
The logline A24 has used describes a young man with a dream nobody respects who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness. Strip away the marketing language and you have a hustler story set in the New York table tennis scene of the early 1950s, when the sport had a surprisingly glamorous underground and a few of its stars could make real money playing exhibitions and side bets.
Marty Mauser is talented, broke and convinced he is the best player alive. The problem is that table tennis in postwar America is a sideshow, not a sport, so he hustles. He plays for money in basement clubs, chases sponsorships and romances people who can get him closer to the top. The trailer shows him in Broadway halls, on ocean liners, in Japan and in what looks like a lot of trouble.
Expect the usual Safdie engine underneath. Josh and Benny’s films are built on a single character making one bad decision after another while the walls close in, and the stress rarely lets up. Uncut Gems is often filed as a crime drama, but it functions like a psychological thriller, with the pressure coming from the inside of Howard’s head as much as from the men chasing him. Marty Supreme looks cut from the same cloth, just with a brighter palette and a period setting.
The real Marty: who was Marty Reisman?
The film is not a straight biopic, and the character’s name has been changed, but Marty Mauser is unmistakably inspired by Marty Reisman. Reisman was born in 1930 on the Lower East Side and became the most famous table tennis player America has ever produced. He won the British Open in 1949, took multiple US national titles and spent decades as the sport’s loudest ambassador, often showing up in a straw hat and a flashy suit to hustle games in New York clubs.
He was also a genuine character. Reisman toured with the Harlem Globetrotters, performing table tennis exhibitions at halftime, and later wrote a memoir called The Money Player in 1974 that is full of stories about gambling, backroom matches and his lifelong war against the sponge paddle. He died in 2012 at age 82, and anyone who grew up around New York table tennis has a Reisman story.
That sponge paddle fight is the historical hinge the film appears to be using. Through the 1940s, top players used hardbat rackets covered in pimpled rubber, which produced long, fast rallies that audiences could follow. At the 1952 World Championships in Bombay, a Japanese player named Hiroji Satoh won with a paddle covered in thick sponge, which changed the physics of the game overnight. Spin became everything, rallies got shorter and players like Reisman who had built their careers on the old style suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of history. Reisman never really made peace with it. The Japanese champion Marty faces in the trailer is almost certainly a stand-in for that moment.
How much is true?
Safdie and Bronstein have been clear in interviews that they are using Reisman as a jumping-off point rather than adapting his life. The name change is the giveaway. Uncut Gems did something similar, drawing on real stories from New York’s Diamond District and the Safdies’ own father without claiming any single person as the source. You should go in expecting a fictional character who shares a sport, a city, a hat and an attitude with a real one, not a history lesson.
Josh Safdie Directs Solo
The most-discussed behind-the-scenes fact about Marty Supreme is that Benny Safdie is not involved. The brothers co-directed Daddy Longlegs (2010), Heaven Knows What (2014), Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), and for a decade they were essentially one filmmaker with two heads. Marty Supreme is the first feature Josh has directed alone since The Pleasure of Being Robbed in 2008, a tiny movie about a kleptomaniac drifting through New York.
The split has been framed publicly as creative rather than hostile. Benny has been building an acting career, with roles in Oppenheimer and the Showtime series The Curse, and he directed his own A24 feature this year: The Smashing Machine, starring Dwayne Johnson as MMA fighter Mark Kerr, which opened in October 2025. So 2025 gives you a natural experiment. Both brothers released sports-adjacent films about driven, self-destructive men through the same studio within three months of each other, and you can watch them back to back and try to figure out which Safdie contributed what to the films they made together.
Ronald Bronstein is the constant. He co-wrote Good Time and Uncut Gems with Josh, co-edited both, and directed the 2007 cult film Frownland, which is the movie that convinced the Safdies to work with him in the first place. He also played the father in Daddy Longlegs. Bronstein’s fingerprints are all over the Safdie rhythm, that overlapping dialogue and constant interruption that makes their scenes feel like eavesdropping. He co-wrote Marty Supreme and, as in the previous films, is credited on the edit.
Behind the Camera: Khondji, Lopatin and the Period Look
Darius Khondji shot Marty Supreme, which is a significant reunion. Khondji was the cinematographer on Uncut Gems, and before that he shot Seven, Delicatessen and Michael Haneke’s Amour. His work on Uncut Gems gave the Diamond District a greasy, jewel-box glow that a lot of people assumed was a digital effect. It was mostly lighting and 35mm film.
Marty Supreme appears to push that approach into the 1950s. The trailer shows saturated reds and golds, smoky club interiors and sunlit Manhattan exteriors that look like they were pulled from a Weegee photograph and then colorized. Safdie has talked about wanting the film to feel like a big studio picture from the era rather than an indie reconstruction of one, and the scale on screen backs that up. There are ocean liners, international tournaments and crowd scenes that would have been unthinkable on the Good Time budget.
That ambition reportedly came with a price. Trade reporting during production described Marty Supreme as the most expensive film A24 has made, with figures in the range of $70 million being floated. Treat the exact number with some caution, since studios rarely confirm budgets, but there is no question this is a different financial tier from anything Safdie has directed before.
Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, is back as composer. His synth-heavy scores for Good Time and Uncut Gems are a huge part of why those films feel the way they do, and the trailer suggests he is bending that sound toward the period without abandoning it. If you liked the way Uncut Gems opened with a choral blast over a colonoscopy, you are in the right place.
Where and When It Was Filmed
Principal photography took place across New York City and the surrounding area in late 2024. Chalamet was photographed on location in Manhattan during the shoot, and the production used real period-appropriate interiors rather than building everything on a stage. That is consistent with how the Safdies have always worked. Good Time was shot in actual Queens apartments and a real hospital, and Uncut Gems turned a working jewelry store on 47th Street into a set.
For a story about the Lower East Side, that matters. Reisman learned the game in neighborhood halls and made his name at Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis, a legendary club in Midtown that drew gamblers, celebrities and hustlers through the 1940s and 1950s. Whether the film recreates Lawrence’s by name or invents its own version, the energy it is chasing is that specific mid-century New York world where a tenement kid could beat a millionaire at a game and walk out with the millionaire’s money.
The Trailer and the Marketing Push
A24 released the first trailer this fall, and it did exactly what a trailer for this kind of movie needs to do. It establishes the period, the hustle and the hat in under three minutes, gives you Paltrow looking like a movie star, lets O’Leary deliver a line or two in character and ends on Chalamet at full volume. The reaction online was immediate, partly because the film had been shrouded in secrecy for over a year and partly because the straw hat and glasses look is a genuine departure for an actor who usually plays brooding and beautiful.
The studio has leaned into Safdie himself as a selling point. He has done a run of podcast and video appearances, including a long sit-down with Anora director Sean Baker released under the Great American Dream Show banner, where the two talked about making movies about hustlers and strivers in a system that does not want them. That conversation is worth your time if you want a sense of how Safdie thinks about Marty as a character rather than as a biopic subject.
Chalamet, meanwhile, has been in full campaign mode. He proved during the A Complete Unknown run that he is willing to do the unconventional publicity swing, and the early signs are that Marty Supreme will get the same treatment. Expect surprise screenings, table tennis stunts and at least one viral moment involving a paddle.
Where to Watch ‘Marty Supreme’
As of now, the only way to see Marty Supreme is in a movie theater starting December 25, 2025. There is no streaming date, no digital release date and no announced plan for a limited early run.
Here is what the path after theaters is likely to look like, based on how A24 has handled its recent releases:
- Theatrical window: A24 generally keeps its bigger films in theaters for several weeks before offering them digitally. Civil War and The Brutalist both had lengthy runs, and an awards contender opening at Christmas usually stays on screens through the Oscars.
- Digital purchase and rental: Expect Marty Supreme on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and the other major storefronts a month or two after opening, at the standard premium pricing for a new release.
- Streaming: A24’s recent theatrical titles have landed on HBO Max for subscription streaming after the digital window. Civil War, The Brutalist and Babygirl all followed that route. Unless A24’s arrangement has changed, that is where Marty Supreme should end up sometime in 2026.
If you are in New York and want the film the way Safdie intended it, look for 35mm showings. A24 has booked film prints for its bigger releases at venues like the Metrograph and the IFC Center in the past, and a Khondji-shot period piece is the ideal candidate. Keep an eye on those listings as the release gets closer.
Why ‘Marty Supreme’ Matters for Awards Season
Chalamet has three Best Actor nominations, for Call Me by Your Name in 2018, A Complete Unknown in 2025 and Marty Supreme in 2026, and has not won. Marty Supreme is positioned as the film that could change that. The role is physical, loud and showy in the way the Academy tends to respond to, and the Christmas date mirrors the exact schedule that got A Complete Unknown into the race last year.
There are reasons to be cautious. The Safdies have never been an Academy favorite. Uncut Gems was one of the best-reviewed films of 2019 and received zero Oscar nominations, which was widely treated as a snub at the time. Sandler’s performance in that film is the obvious precedent for Chalamet’s here, and Sandler did not get in. Voters sometimes struggle with films that are this aggressive in tone.
What is different this time is the package. A24 has become a far more effective awards operator since 2019, with Everything Everywhere All at Once winning Best Picture in 2023 and The Brutalist taking home three Oscars in 2025. Chalamet is a bigger star than Sandler was in the awards world, and Paltrow gives the film a supporting narrative that campaigners love: the Oscar winner who came out of semi-retirement for a great part. Keep an eye on Paltrow in the supporting actress conversation if the reviews land.
How It Fits the Safdie Filmography
If you are coming to Marty Supreme as a Chalamet fan who has never seen a Safdie film, a quick orientation helps.
- The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008): Josh’s solo debut. Shaggy, tiny and shot on the fly in Manhattan. You can see the roots of everything that followed.
- Daddy Longlegs (2010): The brothers’ first feature together, premiered on the festival circuit in 2009, about a chaotic divorced father in New York, with Bronstein in the lead. Loosely drawn from their own childhood.
- Heaven Knows What (2014): A heroin romance shot on the Upper West Side, starring Arielle Holmes in a version of her own life. Uncompromising and hard to watch.
- Good Time (2017): Robert Pattinson’s bank-robber odyssey across Queens, premiered in competition at Cannes. The film that made them famous.
- Uncut Gems (2019): Adam Sandler as a Diamond District jeweler gambling his life away. Christmas release, A24’s biggest hit to that point, and a cult object almost immediately.
Marty Supreme is the first film in that list with a period setting, a movie star in a glamorous supporting role and a budget large enough to leave the five boroughs. It is also the first one Josh has made without Benny since the first entry. That makes it both the most commercial Safdie project to date and, in a strange way, a return to where he started.
What Happens Next
Between now and Christmas, expect reviews to start landing, a final trailer, and a heavy push of Chalamet interviews. After release, the questions become whether the film can match Uncut Gems at the box office, whether Chalamet finally converts a nomination into a win, and how quickly A24 moves it to digital and HBO Max.
For the Safdies as a unit, the open question is whether they will direct together again. Benny has The Smashing Machine behind him and an active acting career, while Josh has reportedly been developing other projects. Nobody has ruled out a reunion, and nobody has promised one either.
Chalamet’s own schedule does not slow down after this. Dune: Part Three is set for December 2026, which means he could be campaigning for Marty Supreme in February and back in the desert by spring.
FAQ
When is Marty Supreme coming out?
Marty Supreme opens in US theaters on Thursday, December 25, 2025, distributed by A24. There is no earlier platform release scheduled.
Is Marty Supreme based on a true story?
Partly. The character Marty Mauser is inspired by Marty Reisman, the Lower East Side table tennis champion and hustler who won the 1949 British Open and spent his life fighting the sponge paddle. The names and many of the events are fictional, so treat it as a story drawn from Reisman’s world rather than a biopic.
Who plays Marty in Marty Supreme?
Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser. He also produced the film, trained in table tennis for the role and is widely expected to be in the Best Actor race for it.
Is Benny Safdie involved in Marty Supreme?
No. Josh Safdie directed solo, with Ronald Bronstein co-writing. Benny Safdie directed his own A24 film this year, The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson, which opened in October 2025.
Where can I stream Marty Supreme?
Nowhere yet. The film is theatrical only at launch. Based on A24’s recent releases such as Civil War and The Brutalist, it should reach digital storefronts first and then HBO Max for subscription streaming in 2026, though no dates have been announced.
What is Gwyneth Paltrow’s role in Marty Supreme?
Paltrow plays Kay Stone, a glamorous older woman who becomes involved with Marty. It is her first significant film role since Avengers: Endgame in 2019 and her most prominent dramatic part in more than a decade.
