Box Office: ‘Marty Supreme’ :
Another batch of holiday films are being released nationwide on Christmas Day in North America, including A24’s high-profile period picture Marty Supreme – starring Timothée Chalamet as a 1950s table tennis champion who will do whatever it takes – and Sony’s Jack Black-Paul Rudd campy monster reboot Anaconda.
Marty Supreme made headlines last weekend with a record-breaking per-location average of $145,913 at six locations in New York City and Los Angeles, the best in A24’s history and the best of any film since 2016’s La La Land . With a hefty budget of $60 million to $70 million, the film is said to be the most expensive film ever made by this prestigious indie studio.
Both films launched in previews on Christmas Eve and went wide on Thursday, with Anaconda earning an estimated $2.1 million, while Marty Supreme earned $2.01 million. Anaconda is perhaps a more commercial offering and is estimating a four-day Christmas weekend to be north of $20 million. However, the reboot has been criticized by critics. Its ranking on Rotten Tomatoes is currently at 44 percent, while the Chalamet film has a new rating of 95 percent (audience scores won’t be posted until tonight or tomorrow).
In his review for THR, chief critic David Rooney says that Marty Supreme reinvents the sports comedy. “For the first time since Josh Safdie directed a feature without his brother and longtime collaborator Benny in 2008, Marty Supreme is, paradoxically, his most Safdiean film yet. Inspired by a hot-wired Timothy Safdie aiming for global table tennis glory, this genre-defying original is a thrilling sports comedy, a sharp character study, a thrilling experience of early ’50s New York City — plus a reimagining of all those things. Uncut James meets Catch Me If You Can and you’re probably halfway there.”
Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’Zion, and Tyler, the Creator also star in this story of a table tennis champion who is passionate about playing ping pong in 1950s Lower East Side Manhattan.
Chalamet has done nothing but help market the film – including becoming the first person to stand on top of The Sphere in Las Vegas on December 22 – and it seems to be paying off. In the weeks before the film’s release, he wrote and directed a staged Zoom call with A24’s marketing team in which he pitched increasingly ridiculous ideas to promote Marty Supreme. One of the ideas presented actually became a reality: fly a bright orange rented blimp with the film’s title emblazoned on both sides. While a cross-country tour was being discussed, the blimp is based in the Los Angeles area. And the idea for Safdie and the cast to decorate the Empire State Building in orange before the New York premiere also came from something said in a staged Zoom call.
The big question facing Marty Supreme is whether it will be able to appeal to mainstream audiences as opposed to traditional specialty audiences.
And, according to Angie Hahn’s Anaconda review for THR, “An action-comedy starring Jack Black, Paul Rudd, and a giant CG snake should be even more entertaining. Director Tom Gormican’s meta-take on previous Anaconda films follows a director (Black) and his crew as they journey into the Amazon to make a defining film about the magnificent monster. Thandiwe Newton and Steve Zahn co-star.
Of course, the overall winner of the holiday box office competition will be Avatar 3 , which is crossing the $500 million mark on Christmas Day, topping the domestic charts on Wednesday with $10.7 million and grossing a North American $129.2 million. Abroad, it added $11 million in foreign exports – including $71 million from China – adding $353.6 million to global exports of $483.3 million through Wednesday. And Disney Animation’s Zootopia 2 is still going strong after opening on Thanksgiving, helping the studio surpass the $6 billion mark in global ticket sales for the first time since 2019, before the pandemic.
Elsewhere on Wednesday’s local chart, Angel Studios’ faith-based David finished third with $2.6 million, followed by Paramount’s The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants ($1.8 million) and Lionsgate’s fame-skewing thriller The Housemaid ($1.8 million), starring Sidney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried. All three films were released on the 19th opposite Avatar, followed by entries on December 25th.
Christmas Day on Thursday is a dream come true for theater owners, as the long holiday weekend will be free and clear. And the last two weeks of the year are the most profitable for watching movies, as schools and colleges are closed, and many adults are also on leave from work.
The Real Table Tennis Player :
In Marty Supreme, released on December 25, Timothée Chalamet stars as a table tennis player who plays ping pong between playing in tournaments and hustling for money in the New York City underworld so he can travel to more matches.
His character Marty Mauser is inspired by New York’s Marty Riesman, one of the world’s best table tennis players, who won 22 major titles from 1946 to 2002, including two United States Opens and one British Open.
Although the plot details in the film are fictional, Riesman was known for his constant running around. Here are things to know about the real-life player who inspired the film
The Marty in Marty Supreme :
The film begins with Mouser running away as a young salesman in his uncle’s Lower East Side shoe store and playing competitive table tennis. While Marty Reisman once worked as a shoe salesman — though not as a young man or as a family member — the job is believed to be one of many short-term jobs he took over the years, “largely as a way to avoid roots or stagnation,” as screenwriter Ronald Bronstein puts it.
Director Josh Safdie first learned about Marty Reisman when his wife Sara bought him a copy of his memoir “The Money Player.” He paid close attention to it, and together with Bronstein, began writing a story about “a Lower East Side provincial dreamer who, through sheer force of will, managed to propel himself onto the postwar world stage,” according to Bronstein. While the film’s plot is not taken from the book, Reisman’s memoir “opened a huge door into a forgotten and highly colorful subculture of New York misfits, passionaries, hustlers, and dreamers.” Coincidentally, Safdie’s uncle played table tennis with some of these characters and even had Shabbat dinner with them.
According to Bronstein, Mauser was always trying to put “his own mark” on ping pong. He was skilled at putting on such a show in every match that people would bet on him. In the film, he also tries to start a business selling orange ping pong balls so players can see them better than white balls.
The film is set in 1952, an important year for Marty Riesman. He lost to a Japanese player in a world championship, although in real life, that tournament was not in London as the film shows, but in Mumbai. Mouser wants a rematch, so he is working hard to raise money to go to the World Table Tennis Championships in Japan. When America and Japan were recently enemies in World War II, an ink-pen mogul (Kevin O’Leary) offers Moser a free ride on his private jet if he agrees to play an exhibition game in Japan and help sell his pens in the country. Mouser doesn’t want to play that match, so he spends the film finding a way to get to Japan.
To be honest, Mouser is more interested in the ink-and-pen mogul’s movie star wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) than in exhibitionist sports. As Bronstein describes the nature of this intense affair, “In Kay, Marty sees a version of his future self: someone who has crossed the threshold of wealth, fame, and legitimacy in his chosen field. In Marty, Kay sees an opportunity to reclaim what he lost—a younger version of himself, before he traded danger and ambition for security.” Eventually, Mouser considers her a means of livelihood, stealing one of her expensive-looking pieces of jewelry to pawn a plane ticket to Japan, but in a moment of karma, he realizes it is just a piece of costume jewelry. He goes to the cave and plays an exhibition game, but due to a penalty in the previous tournament, he does not get the chance to play in the World Championship.
The real Marty Supreme.
Reisman was known as both “The Needle” and “The Bad Boy of Table Tennis” for his fast strokes. A 1974 Time magazine profile described him as a “lifelong con artist” who regularly engaged in “large and small thefts”, and reported that “in the gambling world he remains a legend – on a par with Minnesota Fats and Bobby Riggs.” As Time magazine described their methodology in 1974
“To supplement his income, he would play exhibition matches between half of the Globetrotters’ basketball games, convincing wealthy fans that they could beat him if he sat on the bench after scoring 19 points. If the money were right, even a game with a Reisman trash can lid. After being approached by a Chinese smuggler during a Far Eastern tour, this child loaded himself with contraband gold, and then smuggled it across international borders.”
Needless to say, this is not table tennis played in your parents’ basement. As Reisman described the stakes in The Money Player: “Table tennis players have to survive on their own cunning. A player who relied on performance fees was starving. The top players were either gamblers, smugglers, or both. I had already won over 175 trophies, but I couldn’t eat them.”
Before table tennis games, he liked to measure the net using $100 bills, the New York Times reported in his obituary. As depicted in the film, he played at the famous table tennis club Lawrence in Midtown Manhattan, and from the late 1950s to the late 1970s he also ran his own parlor on the Upper West Side, which was patronized by actor Dustin Hoffman, author Kurt Vonnegut, playwright David Mamet, and chess player Bobby Fischer.
His style was colorful, he wore vintage fedoras and Panama hats. He performed a comedy routine at Harlem Globetrotter games, in which he and his partner Doug Cartland hit balls over a net with a frying pan and the bottom of a sneaker while “Mary Had a Little Lamb” played in the background.
Reisman played table tennis until his death in 2012 at the age of 82. At the time of his death, he was president of the organization he founded, Table Tennis Nation, to promote the sport. Nine months before his death, he stood by his bluff and told the New York Times for a profile, “I faced people in a gladiatorial spirit. I never backed down from the stakes.”