The world had a choice, and one billion times it chose to watch the trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Released March 17 by Sony, the promotional video for Tom Holland’s fourth MCU Spider-Man film crossed one billion views in just four days — the first movie trailer ever to do so. In a world of infinite content, a billion choices were made for the same two minutes of footage about a lonely boy from Queens.
Before Brand New Day, the biggest single-day trailer launches in entertainment history were Deadpool & Wolverine (365 million), Spider-Man: No Way Home (355.5 million), and Grand Theft Auto VI (475 million). Each had felt like a ceiling of what was possible. Brand New Day collected 718.6 million on its first day and demonstrated that no such ceiling existed for the Spider-Man franchise.
WaveMetrix data confirmed 1.1 billion total views by Tuesday — the first trailer to cross that mark in history. The count was still rising, indicating the pre-release tally will be substantially higher than 1.1 billion before the film’s July 31 debut. Projections for the film’s commercial performance have risen steadily alongside the trailer view counts, with some analysts suggesting a $2 billion-plus global run is within reach.
People chose to watch, and kept choosing to watch, because the trailer gave them something genuine. Peter Parker’s life four years after the great forgetting of No Way Home is one of solitude and purpose — a man with no identity left in the eyes of the world, still choosing every day to protect it. His approach to Bruce Banner/Hulk and the threat of an unseen antagonist gave the trailer emotional stakes that feel both personal and planetary.
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, and starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Tramell Tillman, Michael Mando, and Mark Ruffalo, Brand New Day opens July 31 in India in six languages.