Sony’s first Spider Man: Brand New Day trailer pulled 718.6 million views in 24 hours and blew past GTA 6 Trailer 2’s 475 million. With Take Two’s summer marketing push approaching, the next GTA 6 trailer will serve as a test of whether Rockstar will learn from this and change strategies.
For roughly 10 months, Grand Theft Auto VI held the record for the biggest trailer launch in history. As of today, though, that record is gone.
Sony confirmed on Thursday that the first trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day generated 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours, obliterating GTA 6's second trailer, which accumulated 475 million views in its first day when it dropped in May 2025.
The Spider-Man trailer did not just beat the record. It surpassed GTA 6's total in under 12 hours. By the eight-hour mark, it had already cleared 373 million views, enough to break the previous movie trailer record held by Deadpool & Wolverine before even approaching the GTA 6 number.
The record that Rockstar Games held, and that the gaming industry celebrated as proof that video games had eclipsed movies in cultural relevance, lasted less than a year, and the way Sony pulled it off is something Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar could absolutely learn from.
Sony deployed an aggressive influencer strategy where dozens of creators released two-second snippets every hour for 24 hours leading up to the trailer drop, turning the release into a scavenger hunt that generated massive social media engagement before the actual video even went live.
Tom Holland's Instagram alone accounted for 139 million views. Zendaya's added another 36.7 million. The official Spider-Man account contributed 125 million more. TikTok, multiple YouTube channels, and paid advertising placements across platforms inflated the number in ways that Rockstar's comparatively straightforward YouTube drop did not benefit from.
It was a coordinated multi-platform content event engineered for maximum fragmentation across platforms, designed to count views from Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, and paid placements as a unified number, and it worked.
Now, the question is, will Rockstar's approach to the next GTA 6 trailer adapt?
Strauss Zelnick confirmed earlier this month that GTA 6's marketing push begins this summer. He described the acknowledgment of "marketing beats" as "a huge departure" from Take-Two's usual communication style. He also said there is a difference between awareness and energy, and that the company needs to "create the energy" and show consumers "what the visuals look like." That language suggests Rockstar is preparing something bigger than a single YouTube upload.
Everything suggests that Take-Two and Rockstar are slowly building the necessary pieces. Title IDs have already appeared on the PlayStation Store. The commercial infrastructure is being built. The pricing question remains unanswered. No other major game is releasing anywhere near November. Everything is positioned for a trailer drop that ends with a "pre-order now" button appearing on the screen, and pretty much everyone who sees it throws money on their proverbial screen the moment it drops.
If Rockstar does what it did in May 2025, drops a trailer on YouTube, and lets it ride, GTA 6 Trailer 3 will do enormous numbers. It might even reclaim the record, but if Sony's Spider-Man strategy has demonstrated anything, it is that the ceiling is higher than anyone thought, and reaching it requires a distribution approach that goes far beyond a single upload on a single platform.
The studio that defined viral marketing with Grand Theft Auto V in 2013 and then set the all-time record with GTA 6 Trailer 2 cannot afford to treat the next trailer as a repeat performance. The competition for attention is fiercer than ever, and a film studio just proved that with the right multi-platform strategy, 718 million views in 24 hours is achievable, which means anything less from Rockstar will be framed as a step backward, even if the trailer itself is the greatest piece of game marketing ever produced.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day did not beat GTA 6 because it is a better product. It beat GTA 6 because Sony understood that in 2026, a trailer launch is not a video. It is a campaign. If Rockstar understands the same thing, Trailer 3 could take the record back. I
f it does not, the loss of this record will be the least of its problems. Because the energy Zelnick says Take-Two needs to create does not generate itself, and the November 19 launch is close enough now that Trailer 3 has to become the opening act of the biggest entertainment launch in history, and the opening act needs to hit harder than Spider-Man does whenever he stops pulling his punches.
Quick answers
How did Sony’s launch differ from Rockstar’s GTA 6 Trailer 2 rollout?
Sony spread the trailer launch across multiple platforms and creators before the full video even went live. Rockstar’s earlier approach was far simpler by comparison, which means Sony had more ways to rack up views quickly and turn the release into a wider social event.
What concrete numbers show how big the gap was?
Sony said the first Spider Man: Brand New Day trailer reached 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours. GTA 6 Trailer 2 reached 475 million in its first day, and Sony’s campaign also included 139 million views from Tom Holland’s Instagram, 36.7 million from Zendaya, and 125 million from the official Spider Man account.
