MARTY SUPREME’s Original Vampire Ending Was Wild, and A24 Thought It Had to Be a Mistake
Josh Safdie almost ended Marty Supreme with a full-on vampire reveal, and it sounds like it completely floored everyone who read the script.
During a recent appearance on the A24 Podcast, Safdie broke down an early version of the film’s ending that leaned hard into the bizarre and didn’t exactly get a warm reaction from the studio.
The film, which stars Timothée Chalamet as ping-pong prodigy Marty Mauser, was originally written to follow the character far beyond the rise-and-fall sports arc audiences ultimately got.
Safdie explained that the story pushed into the late 1980s, showing Marty fully transformed into a wildly successful businessman after walking away from competitive ping-pong.
“He turns that [shoe store] into the most successful shop on Orchard Street. He changes it to Marty Mauser’s Shoes,” Safdie said of the scraped ending.
“Franchises, franchises again, leaves New York State, becomes a very rich man. All the metrics of success are there. His family grows, he leaves the city, has this beautiful house, and it ends with him at a concert for Tears for Fears with his granddaughter.
“They’re great seats, up front, and he’s watching it. And he’s thinking about ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ and youth, and what does it mean, and he has this success, but he’s not doing the thing that he believed he was born on the planet to do.”
That reflective, almost sentimental note didn’t last long. Safdie said the final image went full genre swerve, paying off a throwaway line from earlier in the movie. Kevin O’Leary plays Milton Rockwell, a ruthless capitalist who at one point casually claims he’s a vampire. In Safdie’s original ending, that line was very real.
“You’re on his eyes, we built the prosthetics for Timmy and everything, and Mr. Wonderful shows up behind him and takes a bite out of his neck, and that was the last image. And he hasn’t aged.”
Safdie said that when executives at A24 read the script, their reaction was immediate and confused. According to the director, they responded by asking, “’This is a mistake, right?’”
As strange as it sounds, O’Leary was fully on board. Speaking to Variety, he said Safdie leaned all the way into the concept, even creating visual effects assets for it.
“Went as far as to make digital teeth,” O’Leary said. “I know that sounds nuts, but to me that would be the right punishment.”
O’Leary also made it clear he wasn’t thrilled with the version of Marty Supreme that ultimately made it to the screen. He described himself as “really unsatisfied” with the ending, arguing that Rockwell gets “f*cked over” while Marty and his family walk away with what he called a “kumbaya ending.”
In O’Leary’s mind, Marty’s selfish choices needed a harsher consequence. He even pitched an even darker idea involving Rachel, played by Odessa A’Zion.
He suggested Odessa A’Zion’s Rachel had to “die in childbirth” at the end as punishment for Marty Mauser’s selfishness. Safdie reportedly considered the idea before deciding it was too “sick.”
The vampire ending may never have seen the light of day, but it adds a whole new layer to Marty Supreme. It also shows just how far Safdie was willing to push the film into unexpected territory, even if it left A24 wondering whether they were reading the right script.