LONG BEACH, Calif. — Commuters who were snaking along the 405 freeway in Southern California on Wednesday morning caught an unusual sight. Just about 800 feet above them, a 135-foot orange blimp drifted along the coast.
Inside a gondola below the airship, the pilot was gently pumping foot pedals to steer the blimp over the Queen Mary and the L.A. River as the sun rose over the Pacific.
The aim of this peaceful morning ride was in fact a bold one: to save independent film, or at least one film. Indie studio A24 rented the blimp to promote “Marty Supreme,” its new Timothée Chalamet movie that rolls out in theaters on Christmas Day.
The blimp, which floated from Nashville to Los Angeles last month, is just the latest in a series of unusual marketing techniques the studio is deploying to spread the word about the film, which is about an aspiring ping-pong champion in post-World War II New York.
“Marty Supreme” represents A24’s biggest production budget to date, at about $60 million. The marketing is an additional cost, which A24 has not disclosed, though it is widely believed to be less expensive than a traditional campaign because of its reliance more on unconventional stunts than on costly TV and outdoor ads.
“It’s both more expensive and less effective to market a movie today than ever before,” said Daniel Loria, senior vice president of the Boxoffice Company, a theatrical e-commerce and data services firm. “Peoples’ attention spans are really divided.”
A24 has dropped limited-edition merchandise, like a highly coveted $250 windbreaker, put their star on the cover of a Wheaties box and orchestrated a surprise premiere at the New York Film Festival. With an Instagram post from Chalamet, they alerted fans to a “Marty Supreme” streetwear popup in East Hollywood, generating crowds so big the LAPD was called.
Chalamet and the film’s director, Josh Safdie, traveled to a fan event in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where they danced to Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” and handed out orange ping-pong balls. The movie’s maximum effort promotional campaign has even poked fun at itself, in an 18-minute mock Zoom meeting between Chalamet and a marketing team in which he proposed painting the Statue of Liberty orange.
The strategy has been both weirder and more original than simply dropping a movie trailer and buying TV ads and billboards, a technique that used to be known as “spray and pray.” That’s because it takes creativity to get people to go see an offbeat movie in a theater in 2025, even when it stars Hollywood’s hottest young actor.
During the pandemic, audiences learned to stay home and stream instead of heading to theaters, and domestic box office last year was still 24% below pre-pandemic levels. Enticing ticket buyers for movies that are not part of a well-known franchise is especially hard, and even stars don’t guarantee a big turnout.
Despite Dwayne Johnson in the lead, A24’s “The Smashing Machine” opened to a disappointing $6 million in October, and Sydney Sweeney’s “Christie,” from Black Bear Pictures, also underperformed, earning just $1.3 million in a wide opening release.
“What used to work doesn’t work now. It’s such a fractured, competitive environment,” said a veteran marketing executive, who spoke off the record because she was not authorized to comment on competitors. “People don’t think they need to go to the movie theaters anymore. The question becomes, ‘Is this theater worthy for me?’”
Other studios have also been experimenting with unorthodox promotions this year. To help them open “Final Destination: Bloodlines” this spring, Warner Bros. sent logging trucks spattered with fake blood out onto highways, in a reference to one of the horror franchise’s infamous kill scenes. For an influencer screening of their Stephen King adaptation “The Long Walk,” Lionsgate had the audience walk on treadmills for the duration of the movie. To get crowds to Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Bugonia” this fall, Focus Features held “bald screenings“ for hairless moviegoers, a nod to Emma Stone’s character in the film. (Focus Features is a division of NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)
There is a long history of Hollywood and movie theater owners getting inventive to attract crowds. To generate buzz around the 1973 dystopia “Soylent Green,” some theater owners filled their concession slushy machines with green food coloring, a reference to the film’s title, a mysterious and ultimately cannibalistic food source on an environmentally devastated future Earth. Also in 1973, for “The Exorcist,” theater owners paid to have ambulances parked outside, to imply to would-be moviegoers that the film is just that scary.
“The showmanship aspect has always been there,” Loria said. “What’s new is the virality.”
“Marty Supreme” will open in 70mm in a handful of theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on Dec. 18, ahead of a nationwide release on thousands of screens on Christmas Day.
“This is the type of movie that needs all the help it can get,” Loria said. “It’s coming a week after ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash.’ It doesn’t have IP to grow on. It needs conversation starters.”
With Chalamet nominated for a Golden Globe, and a likely Academy Award front-runner, A24 will look to keep the conversation rolling into the New Year.
The blimp, however, is on its way home to Nashville.
