Great Gatsby Reaction

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Published August 25, 2026

Great Gatsby Reaction is a reaction image and GIF format showing Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby raising a martini glass in the 2013 film adaptation. Tumblr users popularized the toast in May 2013 as a way to signal agreement, celebration, or ironic praise, and it later spread as an image macro across meme sites.

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Overview

Great Gatsby Reaction, also called the Leonardo DiCaprio Toast, is a reaction image and GIF pulled from Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film The Great Gatsby1. In the shot, DiCaprio's Jay Gatsby lifts a coupe of champagne toward the camera with a tight smile and fireworks behind him, which is why people paste it under any post they want to salute2.

The format is usually deployed as sincere agreement, sarcastic congratulations, or a general "cheers to that" reply. It shows up both as a looping GIF in comment threads and as a still image macro with overlaid text, most famously the Fergie lyric "A Little Party Never Killed Nobody"3.

Origin & Background

Platform
The Great Gatsby (film) / Tumblr (viral spread)
Date
2013

The clip comes from a specific frame in The Great Gatsby, which hit theaters on May 1st, 20131. The toast itself was already circulating online before the movie's premiere because it appeared 43 seconds into the second official theatrical trailer, released on December 20th, 20122.

Giving early meme-makers a clean, high-resolution shot of Gatsby raising his glass months ahead of release, that trailer moment is the source frame for essentially every version of the reaction that followed1.

How It Spread

The reaction took off on Tumblr in May 2013, right as Fergie's soundtrack single "A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got)" was in heavy rotation2. On May 13th, 2013, Tumblr user boosted-minkica posted a set of GIFs of the Gatsby toast that became one of the earliest widely reblogged versions1.

That same day, user hawkeyedriza replied to a post reading "you can't repeat the past" with the Gatsby toast and the line "of course you can," which was capped by catherine-is-a-lemon adding "*whispers* old sport." The chain racked up more than a million notes1. On May 24th, The Meta Picture published an image macro pairing the toast with the Fergie lyric "A little party never killed nobody," pushing the format beyond Tumblr3.

BuzzFeed ran a ranking on June 17th, 2013 called "The Top 3 Times Leonardo DiCaprio Raised His Glass," placing the Gatsby scene at number two4. On July 16th, Meme Generator added the image to its template library, letting anyone slap their own caption on the toast and cementing it as a standard reaction1.

How to Use This Meme

Typical usage is dropping the GIF or still under a post you want to celebrate, congratulate, or ironically endorse. A common convention is pairing it with old-money slang like "old sport," the "a little party never killed nobody" lyric, or a smug "cheers to that." As an image macro, people often overlay top text that sets up something petty or self-satisfied, with the toast delivering the punchline1.

Frequently Asked Questions