How millions of people just got to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day for free

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has only just swung into cinemas, but plenty of people have apparently already managed to see Tom Holland’s latest Marvel outing without buying a ticket.

The fourth solo Spider-Man movie starring Holland arrived with massive hype behind it, picking up after the world forgot Peter Parker’s identity at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Zendaya returns as MJ, whilst Jacob Batalon is back as Ned. Jon Bernthal’s Punisher also joins the action after only previously being on the TV side of the MCU, alongside Sadie Sink in a role Marvel had worked hard to keep under wraps before release.

Said secrecy was meant to protect some of the film’s biggest surprises, particularly for fans heading to opening-weekend screenings.

With months of speculation surrounding its characters and story, avoiding spoilers had already become a challenge for anyone who hadn’t seen the film on its release day of July 29.

The leak arrived just as Brand New Day hit US cinemas (Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube)

However, those plans were dealt a major blow when a high-quality bootleg of the entire movie was uploaded directly to X (formerly Twitter), allowing millions of users to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day for free before it was removed — as revealed by Variety.

The copy was reportedly posted by an account named ‘Fredrick Bryan’ at 6.05am PT on July 31, the same day the film reached US cinemas.

It then remained available for more than nine hours, before finally being taken down at around 3.25pm PT.

By that point, the post had reportedly reached 5.9 million accounts, collected more than 143,000 likes and been reshared over 10,000 times.

Other accounts are also said to have uploaded copies, although most did not remain online for long. Some viewers claimed they had managed to watch a large portion of the film before the video suddenly disappeared, while others began asking whether anyone had saved a copy.

Shorter clips containing some of the movie’s biggest reveals also started spreading across the platform.

IGN found that several were later replaced with a message reading: “this media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner”.

Despite the leak, preview takings still reached a record $72 million (Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube)

Sony declined to comment on the leak, and it remains unclear whether the studio intends to take any further action against those involved.

The incident comes just days after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was also uploaded to X in full.

That leak reportedly attracted 2.1 million views within two and a half hours before the post was removed and the account behind it was suspended.

Universal Pictures later said: “We became aware of the unauthorized posting of the film and immediately initiated takedown protocols. We take copyright infringement seriously and will pursue all appropriate remedies to protect our content and intellectual property rights.”

Despite the Spider-Man leak, early signs suggest the film has still had an enormous theatrical launch.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day reportedly earned a record-breaking $72 million from preview screenings, including early-access showings, placing it ahead of Avengers: Endgame’s $60 million preview total.