Spider-Man: Brand New Day film leaked on X
The illegal video reached 5.9 million accounts before Sony got it taken down.
A high-quality bootleg of Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit X two days after release, reaching 5.9 million accounts before it was pulled nine hours later. Marvel and Universal have gone after leaks like this. Sony, so far, has said nothing.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day had one of the biggest openings in movie history this weekend. It also spent nine hours as the most-watched bootleg on the internet.
A high-quality pirated copy of the Marvel film was uploaded to X early Friday, two days after the movie hit theaters. Before it got taken down, it reached a huge audience.
Here’s what happened, how many people saw it, and what the studios are, and aren’t, doing about it.
How the Spider-Man: Brand New Day leak spread on X
The leak came from an X account posting under the name Fredrick Bryan, which uploaded the full film at 6:05 a.m. PT Friday.
It spread fast. The post stayed up until around 3:25 p.m. PT, so roughly nine hours, which is an eternity for a pirated blockbuster sitting in the open on a major platform.
Other accounts piled on, posting their own copies. Most of those got pulled quickly under copyright complaints, but new uploads kept replacing the deleted ones. Short clips spoiling the movie’s biggest reveals scattered across the platform too, many now replaced with a notice that the copyright owner had the media disabled.
There’s a specific reason a whole movie can live on X like this. Since Elon Musk bought the platform, X Premium subscribers can post videos up to four hours long, which makes uploading an entire feature film possible in a way it wasn’t before.
How many people watched the Spider-Man leak
The numbers are big, and they’re the reason this is a story.
The original leaked post reached about 5.9 million accounts before it came down, per Variety. It pulled more than 143,000 likes and over 10,000 reposts during the hours it was up.
That’s just the one post. It doesn’t count the copies other accounts uploaded, or the spoiler clips, or the people who watched without liking or resharing. The real number of people who saw at least some of the movie is almost certainly higher.
Some users posted that they’d caught the first chunk before it vanished. Others said they nearly finished the whole thing.
What Marvel and Sony plan to do about the leak
This is where it gets interesting, because the studios aren’t all responding the same way.
Sony owns Spider-Man, and Sony has said nothing. Both Variety and Deadline asked for comment and got no response. Marvel Studios, which co-produces the films, did take action against the leak, issuing takedowns.
The usual studio playbook is to fire off copyright infringement notices and get the uploads pulled, which is clearly happening given how fast the copies disappeared. The problem is volume. For a movie this popular, new uploads appear faster than anyone can remove them, so it turns into whack-a-mole.
The contrast with last week is notable. When Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey leaked on X, distributor Universal put out a statement saying it “immediately initiated takedown protocols” and got the account suspended. Sony hasn’t offered even that much publicly, at least not yet.
The leak didn’t stop Spider-Man’s record opening
Here’s the good news for Sony, and the reason the leak may not sting as much as it looks.
Despite spending Friday as a free download, Brand New Day still posted a record-breaking opening day, projected between $167 million and $173 million. That beats Avengers: Endgame‘s $157.4 million single-day record from 2019.
So millions may have watched a bootleg, and millions more still bought tickets. As one report put it, the strong turnout suggests plenty of fans wanted to see this one the way it was meant to be seen, on a big screen, not a phone.
This is also part of a pattern X can’t seem to shake. The Odyssey leaked the same way a week earlier and still opened huge. Whether the leaks actually cost these movies money is genuinely hard to measure, since both films are performing like the piracy never happened.
Still, two major releases leaking in high quality on the same platform in two weeks is a problem the studios can’t love. Sony’s silence might just be it choosing to let a record opening do the talking. Beat the bootleg at the box office, and maybe the leak isn’t worth dignifying.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Variety (August 1, 2026), the leak timeline, the 5.9 million accounts, the 143,000 likes, and the Odyssey comparison
Deadline (August 1, 2026), the record opening-day projection, the X four-hour-video detail, and Sony’s non-response
ComicBook via Yahoo (August 1, 2026), Marvel Studios acting on the leak, the disabled-media notices, and the spoiler-clip spread
Newsbytes (August 1, 2026), the exact upload and takedown timestamps and the ongoing re-upload problem