426.8 million views generated by external media and creators. 718.6 million trailer views in the first 24 hours. And one casting mystery that kept audiences guessing for more than a year. Spider-Man: Brand New Day demonstrates just how much attention a brand can generate by choosing not to reveal everything.

A sizeable part of my LinkedIn bubble will probably have seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day. At least, the numbers suggest as much: with approximately $2.52 billion in worldwide box office revenue, the film ranks among the three highest-grossing movies of all time. Only Avengers: Endgame and Avatar are ahead of it. (Source: Box Office Mojo, worldwide box office rankings, October 2026.)

What makes this particularly remarkable is that we are not talking about the launch of a new franchise. Brand New Day is the fourth film starring Tom Holland as Spider-Man. The story picks up four years after No Way Home, with Peter Parker living in a world that no longer remembers him, while his former friends have moved on with their lives. (Source: Sony Pictures, official film synopsis.)

A fourth instalment, an established cinematic universe and a story built around one of the previous film’s most emotional turning points. So how do you turn that into a global cinema event?

The answer certainly isn’t a single marketing tactic. But one particularly interesting part of the campaign began with a piece of information Marvel chose not to reveal for an unusually long time.

01 / THE CAST: Attention that exists before the first trailer

Tom Holland and Zendaya have long been more than the two leads of a successful film franchise. Their relationship has become a recurring part of pop culture in its own right, with their joint appearances regularly attracting attention far beyond traditional film coverage.

Holland has been the face of the MCU’s Spider-Man since 2016. Zendaya, meanwhile, has evolved from a Disney Channel star into one of the most influential actresses of her generation. Her role as MJ is not simply a romantic subplot. The relationship between Peter and MJ forms the emotional core of the previous films. The ending of No Way Home took that connection to an entirely new level.

Sadie Sink brought another major audience to the cast. Already internationally recognised for her role in Stranger Things, she had an established and highly engaged fanbase of her own. Her casting in March 2025 was therefore news in itself.

But there was one detail that made her involvement particularly interesting: nobody knew who she was going to play.

02 / THE RUMOR ENGINE: Turning an unanswered question into a content format

On 12 March 2025, Sadie Sink’s involvement in Brand New Day was announced. Marvel and Sony kept her character under wraps. That created an information gap which would fuel speculation for months.

Who was Sadie Sink playing? What connection did her character have to Spider-Man? And why was Marvel being so secretive about it?

Theories involving the X-Men universe became particularly prominent. The possibility that Sink was playing Jean Grey emerged as one of the central talking points. Film and comic-book channels picked up on clues, analysed alleged leaks and developed their own theories. On Reddit, the question was repeatedly debated across Marvel, Spider-Man and X-Men communities.

The crucial point: the community wasn’t simply waiting for the next official release. It was creating its own entertainment around the film.

YouTube channels such as New Rockstars and Heavy Spoilers turned every new piece of information into analysis videos and discussions. Scooper accounts circulated alleged set information. A brief hint became a theory, the theory became a video, and the video sparked another round of discussion.

The mystery was finally resolved after the film’s release: Sadie Sink plays Jean Grey. In an interview with Vanity Fair on 7 August 2026, she explained that online speculation had actually brought the possibility to her attention before Marvel and Sony approached her. There was no traditional audition process. (Source: Rebecca Ford, Vanity Fair, “Sadie Sink Finally Speaks About Her Top Secret Spider-Man Character”, 7 August 2026.)

It’s a remarkable story within the story: the speculation didn’t end with the casting announcement. It only intensified.

03 / EARNED ATTENTION: 426.8 million views beyond the studio’s own channels

A case study published by British agency Multiple, which handled the digital PR and creator campaign for Sony Pictures UK, illustrates just how much attention was generated beyond the film’s official channels.

426.8 million views were attributed to two key parts of its creator and media activity:

414 million views came from a London cast junket featuring Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon. Five major social-first publishers were involved: LADbible, BuzzFeed UK, MTV UK, JOE and Jeremy Lynch.

A further 12.8 million views came from an influencer campaign involving creators in film, family, art, lifestyle and sport.

(Source: Multiple Agency, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day – Digital PR & Creator Campaign”, Sony Pictures UK case study.)

From a marketing perspective, this is particularly interesting because the content was not distributed exclusively through Marvel’s or Sony’s official channels. External publishers and creators produced their own formats for their respective communities.

The campaign did not rely on reaching one enormous, undifferentiated audience. Instead, it distributed content across different interest areas. Film fans were reached through film creators, families through family-focused content, and other audiences through lifestyle, art and sport.

The agency describes this as a targeted segmentation strategy: different creator environments were used to reach different parts of the fanbase.

There is another remarkable figure. According to Sony and the agency Multiple, the first trailer generated 718.6 million views within its first 24 hours. Sony published the figure, citing WaveMetrix; it was subsequently reported by Screen International on 19 March 2026.

It is important to distinguish between the two figures: the 718.6 million trailer views are not included in the 426.8 million generated by the cast junket and influencer campaign. They are separate campaign metrics. Nor do these figures represent unique individuals; they are cumulative views across the respective platforms and publications.

Even so, they illustrate the sheer scale of attention generated in the months surrounding the film’s release, far beyond conventional cinema advertising.

04 / THE BUSINESS OF FANDOM: Why this attention has commercial value

This dynamic is not accidental. Major consulting firms are increasingly examining how fandom, communities and attention can be translated into commercial value.

Deloitte’s Digital Media Trends 2026 specifically explores how entertainment brands can keep fans engaged between releases and seasons. The study is based on a survey of 3,575 US consumers, conducted in October and November 2025.

The findings are striking:

• Around 80% of respondents identify as fans of at least one entertainment category.

• Fans spend 51 more minutes per day consuming media and entertainment than non-fans.

• 55% engage with their fandom across multiple platforms. Among Gen Z, that figure rises to 71%; among Millennials, it is 67%.

• 46% actively seek out creator content related to their fandom.

• Another 46% say recommendations from their fan community make them more likely to engage with entertainment content.

(Source: Deloitte Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications, 2026 Digital Media Trends: Capturing always-on fandom between releases and seasons, 25 March 2026; sample: 3,575 US consumers, including 2,977 self-identified fans.)

This describes almost exactly what happened around Brand New Day: the film was not marketed solely through its official channels. It became a topic of conversation, a mystery and the subject of continuous content production by third parties.

McKinsey has also examined the commercial value of different attention and consumer segments. In its study The Attention Equation, the firm identifies a group it calls “Content Lovers”. They account for approximately 13% of consumers, consume 1.7 times as much content and spend 2.4 times as much money on content as the average consumer.

Another group, described by McKinsey as “Community Trendsetters”, makes up around 10% of consumers. These are people who actively shape cultural conversations and fandoms, engage on social platforms and spend disproportionately on their interests.

(Source: McKinsey, The Attention Equation: Winning the Right Battles for Consumer Attention, 2025.)

These are audiences that don’t simply watch a trailer and then buy a cinema ticket. They engage with a franchise across platforms, formats and products. They discuss, recommend, create their own content and help extend a brand’s visibility.

05 / LESS IS MORE: The strategic value of an information gap

What I find particularly interesting about the campaign is not just the sheer volume of content, but how that content came into existence.

Brands usually try to answer as many questions as possible. They explain their products, showcase key features, release trailers and tell the stories they want audiences to hear.

With Sadie Sink, Marvel did almost exactly the opposite for an extended period. One crucial piece of information remained undisclosed. And that information gap became a content format in its own right.

Fans had a reason to keep coming back to the film. Creators had a reason to produce new videos. Media outlets had a reason to pick up the speculation. Every new theory extended the lifespan of the original casting announcement.

Whether individual pieces of information were deliberately fed to scoopers or leak accounts is impossible to establish from the outside. But that is not essential to understanding the mechanism. The audience itself kept the unanswered question alive.

The principle can be applied beyond Hollywood. Apple has understood for years how information gaps and carefully managed expectations can become part of product communication. Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast also benefit from communities that spend the time between releases discussing theories, speculation and possible developments around Warhammer 40,000 and Magic: The Gathering.

Of course, not every product can be turned into a mystery. And not every brand has the cultural reach of a Marvel franchise. But the underlying question is worth considering: does a brand really need to provide every piece of information itself and produce all the entertainment around its products?

Perhaps some of the greatest potential lies in deliberately holding something back. A successful campaign does not need to control every conversation. It needs to give people a reason to keep talking voluntarily.

A comparison with Spider-Man: No Way Home puts the scale of this shift into perspective. No Way Home had an enormous nostalgia advantage, bringing back former Spider-Man actors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield alongside Willem Dafoe and other familiar faces in a multiverse-driven story. Its $1.92 billion worldwide gross was a phenomenal box-office result. Yet Brand New Day surpassed it by approximately $600 million, reaching $2.52 billion, with less star power driving anticipation but a marketing strategy that generated substantially more digital attention.

It did so with an estimated 82% less US national TV advertising spend: $3.6 million compared with $20.2 million. Meanwhile, trailer views in the first 24 hours more than doubled, from 355.5 million to 718.6 million. Cast and creator content also grew substantially, from more than 240 million to over 426.8 million video views, an increase of approximately 78%.

These figures point to a fundamental shift in entertainment marketing. Marvel is increasingly reaching younger audiences, particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha, through digital channels and creator-led content. Their attention is no longer primarily won through traditional TV advertising. Disney’s strategy demonstrates that a blockbuster campaign can generate substantially more audience engagement and box office revenue with a fraction of the previous TV investment. In today’s entertainment landscape, massive TV spending is no longer a prerequisite for massive box office success.

With Brand New Day, a closely guarded casting decision became a content engine that ran for months. And perhaps the most remarkable detail is that, for a long time, the question itself was more valuable to the community than the answer.