Say what you like about the Elon Musk-owned Twitter/X—for instance, that it’s become so glutted with vile advertising, incoherent ragebaiters-for-profit, and strong whiffs of Musk’s particular anti-immigrant steeze that even 20 seconds of exposure will give any sane human with a functioning limbic system a strong urge to run off a cliff—but it is a pretty good place to catch a movie! Specifically, to catch the forthcoming biggest movie on the planet, apparently, as Variety reports that an upload of Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day spent nine hours available for viewing on the platform on the Friday morning of its release weekend, before the social media site’s content police finally managed to pull the “high-quality bootleg” down.
And although we, personally, have never been tasked with policing a web site that mostly seems to be concerned with allowing people mad about Black people being cast in movies to make money off of other people mad about Black people being cast in movies, that does seem like a pretty long time for the upload to be active! Long enough, for instance, for it to have reached 5.9 million accounts and be liked more than 100,000 times, according to Variety, with at least some of those users presumably thrilling at the chance to watch Peter Parker’s web-slinging antics play out in the same phone app where they normally get only the best of arguments about why video game women should have larger, and less-covered, breasts.
Although people have obviously been sharing pirated video clips on the internet since before the birth of YouTube, the addition of Musk’s paid Premium tier to Twitter back in 2023 has helped inject a dose of new life into the practice. One of the perks of said paid membership was the lifting of video length limits, to the point that it’s become easy to upload entire Hollywood films—a practice Musk himself has occasionally encouraged directors to take advantage of by (legally) posting their own movies, most recently with Uwe Boll’s Armie Hammer provocation Citizen Vigilante. And, sure, you could argue that this latest leak won’t necessarily be hurting Brand New Day’s box office returns—the film just broke the record for the biggest opening day in movie history—but it’s still a pretty clear reminder of how regulation standards at Twitter/X have felt ever-more slippery under Musk’s rule.
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