A high-quality bootleg of Spider-Man: Brand New Day sat in plain sight on X for most of Friday, reaching 5.9 million accounts before Sony managed to get it pulled. The post went up at 6:05 am PT from an account calling itself Fredrick Bryan, early enough that plenty of people in the US saw the film before their local matinee started. It stayed live until roughly 3:25 pm PT, by which point it had collected more than 143,000 likes and over 10,000 reshares.Copies surfaced on other accounts through the day, though most lasted only minutes. Clips spoiling the film’s biggest reveals spread faster than the full rip and proved harder to contain, with many of those posts now replaced by a copyright-disabled notice. Sony declined to comment.
The Odyssey last week, Spider-Man this week: How X keeps ending up as the internet’s biggest movie leak platform
This is the second time in eight days that a major release has been dumped on X in full. A three-hour rip of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey went up last weekend, pulled 2.1 million views in two and a half hours, and ended with the account suspended. Universal said it moved to takedown protocols as soon as it spotted the upload and would chase every remedy available to protect its copyright.The mechanics are simple enough. Since Elon Musk’s 2022 rebrand, X Premium subscribers have been able to upload videos up to four hours long, which is comfortably more runway than most tentpoles need.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day box office records survived the piracy anyway
None of it slowed the film down. Brand New Day took $72 million in previews, including Tuesday early-access screenings, beating the $60 million Avengers: Endgame managed in 2019. Friday’s opening day landed at roughly $168 million with previews folded in, ahead of Endgame‘s $157.4 million.Sony is guiding conservatively at $325 million for the weekend. Endgame‘s $357 million still stands as the domestic record, with Spider-Man: No Way Home second at $260 million.Tom Holland returns as Peter Parker alongside Zendaya’s MJ, with Sadie Sink in a role Sony has worked hard to keep under wraps, plus Jon Bernthal and Jacob Batalon. IGN scored it 7/10.The leak was enormous by any normal measure. It just happened to run into a weekend where several million people paid for a ticket regardless.